Gender, Technology and the New Woman 9781474416276

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Gender, Technology and the New Woman

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys Volumes available in the series In Lady Audley’s Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres Saverio Tomaiuolo Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism Deaglán Ó Donghaile William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–1914 Anna Vaninskaya 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain Nicholas Freeman Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-­American Spiritualist Writing, 1848–1930 Christine Ferguson Dickens’s London: Perception, Subjectivity and Phenomenal Urban Multiplicity Julian Wolfreys Re-­Imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in fin de siècle Literature Robbie McLaughlan Roomscape: Women Readers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf Susan David Bernstein Women and the Railway, 1850–1915 Anna Despotopoulou Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy Kate Hext London’s Underground Spaces: Representing the Victorian City, 1840–1915 Haewon Hwang Moving Images: Nineteenth-­Century Reading and Screen Practices Helen Groth Jane Morris: The Burden of History Wendy Parkins Thomas Hardy’s Legal Fictions Trish Ferguson Exploring Victorian Travel Literature: Disease, Race and Climate Jessica Howell Spirit Becomes Matter: The Brontës, George Eliot, Nietzsche Henry Staten Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction: Mapping Psychic Spaces Lizzy Welby The Decadent Image: The Poetry of Wilde, Symons and Dowson Kostas Boyiopoulos

British India and Victorian Literary Culture Máire ní Fhlathúin Anthony Trollope’s Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and Literary Form Frederik Van Dam Dark Paradise: Pacific Islands in the Nineteenth-­ Century British Imagination Jenn Fuller Twentieth-­Century Victorian: Arthur Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine, 1891–1930 Jonathan Cranfield The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity Marion Thain Gender, Technology and the New Woman Lena Wånggren Forthcoming volumes The Pre-­Raphaelites and Orientalism Eleonora Sasso Her Father’s Name: Gender, Theatricality and Spiritualism in Florence Marryat’s Fiction Tatiana Kontou The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Sexualities Patricia Pulham Olive Schreiner and the Politics of Print Culture, 1883–1920 Clare Gill Victorian eBook: Nineteenth-­Century Literature and Electrical Technologies of Representation, 1875–1910 Verity Hunt Dickens’s Clowns: Charles Dickens, Joseph Grimaldi and the Pantomime of Life Jonathan Buckmaster Victorian Auto/Biography: Problems in Genre and Subject Amber Regis Victorian Poetry, Poetics and the Literary Periodical Caley Ehnes Self-­Harm in New Woman Writing Alexandra Gray Dickens and Demolition: Literary Allusion and Urban Change in the Mid-­Nineteenth Century Joanna Robinson Suffragist Artists in Partnership: Gender, Word and Image Lucy Ella Rose

Visit the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture web page at www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/ series/ecvc Also Available: Victoriographies – A Journal of Nineteenth-­Century Writing, 1790–1914, edited by Julian Wolfreys ISSN: 2044-­2416 www.eupjournals.com/vic

Gender, Technology and the New Woman 

Lena Wånggren

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-­edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Lena Wånggren, 2017 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10.5­/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 1626 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 1627 6 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1628 3 (epub) The right of Lena Wånggren to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Illustrationsvi Acknowledgementsviii Series Editor’s Preface x Introduction1 1. The New Woman in Technological Modernity

12

2. Typewriters and Typists: Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle

34

3. The ‘Freedom Machine’: The New Woman and the Bicycle

62

4. Medical New Women I: Nurses

101

5. Medical New Women II: Doctors

132

6. Technologies of Detection

164

Conclusion196 Bibliography Index

198 213

Illustrations

Figure 1.1 ‘Donna Quixote’, Punch, or the London Charivari (28 April 1894): 194. Illustrator unknown.23 Figure 2.1 Front cover, Grant Allen (pseud. Olive Pratt Rayner), The Type-­Writer Girl (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1897). Illustrator unknown. Reproduced by kind permission of the National Library of Scotland. 48 Figure 2.2 Front cover, Tom Gallon, The Girl Behind the Keys (London: Hutchinson, 1903). Illustrator unknown. Reproduced by kind permission of the National Library of Scotland. 58 Figure 3.1 J. Ayton Symington, ‘A sitting position on the gravel’, in H. G. Wells, The Wheels of Chance: A Holiday Adventure (London: J. M. Dent, 1896): 36. Cornell University Library, via Archive.org.83 Figure 3.2 J. Ayton Symington, ‘“Here we can talk”’, in H. G. Wells, The Wheels of Chance: A Holiday Adventure (London: J. M. Dent, 1896): frontispiece. Cornell University Library, via Archive.org.87 Figure 3.3 Gordon Browne, ‘“Seems I didn’t make much of a job of it”’, in Grant Allen, Miss Cayley’s Adventures (London: Grant Richards, 1899): 66. University of Alberta Libraries, via Archive.org. 93 Figure 3.4 Gordon Browne, ‘“Don’t scorch, miss; don’t scorch”’, in Grant Allen, Miss Cayley’s Adventures (London: Grant Richards, 1899): 78. University of Alberta Libraries, via Archive.org. 94

Illustrations    vii

Figure 3.5 Gordon Browne, ‘“I am here, behind you, Herr Lieutenant,”’ in Grant Allen, Miss Cayley’s Adventures (London: Grant Richards, 1899): 83. University of Alberta Libraries, via Archive.org. 96 Figure 4.1 Gordon Browne, ‘With a little scream she let the basin fall’, in Grant Allen, Hilda Wade (London: Grant Richards, 1900): 136. University of Alberta Libraries, via Archive.org. 123 Figure 4.2 Gordon Browne, ‘Their glances met’, in Grant Allen, Hilda Wade (London: Grant Richards, 1900): 24. University of Alberta Libraries, via Archive.org.126 Figure 4.3 Gordon Browne, ‘Hilda pedalled bravely by my side’, in Grant Allen, Hilda Wade (London: Grant Richards, 1900): 209. University of Alberta Libraries, via Archive.org. 128 Figure 5.1 George du Maurier, ‘When pain and anguish wring the brow’, Punch, or the London Charivari (21 May 1892): 245. Wellcome Library, London. Reproduced through a Creative Commons license. 146 Figure 5.2 A. S. Boyd, ‘“It’s all right, Doctor,” said she, soothingly’, in Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’, The Idler: An Illustrated Magazine, 5 (July 1894): 226. 161 Figure 6.1 ‘The Detective – New Style – In the Laboratory’, in T. F. Manning, ‘The Medical Detective and His Work: Criminals Convicted by the Microscope’, Harmsworth Magazine, 1 (1898): 145. Illustrator unknown. Reproduced by kind permission of the National Library of Scotland. 175 Figure 6.2 Front cover, Mathias McDonnell Bodkin, Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective (London: Chatto & Windus, 1900). Illustrator unknown. Reproduced by kind permission of the National Library of Scotland.177

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time coming, with work at times concentrated but mostly scattered over the last few years. There are many people who have helped me throughout the process; there is not enough space here to thank them all. I could not have written the book were it not for the encouragement and friendship of many fantastic persons. As always, thanks to Bob Irvine and Penny Fielding for their encouragement, time and support. Thanks also to Jonathan Wild for very helpful advice along the way. Thanks to the great people at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, where I was lucky to spend a few months researching early women doctors. Thanks to my colleagues on the Stevenson Edition, both near and afar, for great work and company the last few years, and thanks furthermore to my students and co-­workers at Edinburgh for the same. I am grateful to the National Library of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh Main Library for their assistance with my research; thanks especially to Hazel Stewart for help with illustrations. Further thanks go to Julian Wolfreys and Adela Rauchova at Edinburgh University Press, who have been very supportive throughout the course of the book. I am incredibly grateful to friends and colleagues who have given their time to read drafts of various chapters: Felicity Tolley, Michael Stewart, Suchitra Choudhury, Linda Tym, Muireann Crowley, Ally Crockford and Samantha Walton. I am also indebted to colleagues and friends whose discussions and suggestions have been extremely helpful: special thanks to Nina Engelhardt for talking me through the physics of human flight, and to Jamil Sawal for doing the same with electromagnetism. Thanks to Gender Studies colleagues, fellow Science and Literature conference-­goers and Science and Technology Studies friends, for chats, support and advice: Maria do Mar Pereira, Jonathan Dean, Kate Sang, Órla Murray, Chisomo Kalinga and Valeri Wiegel among many others. Most of all, warmest thanks to my friends, family, sheroes, comrades

Acknowledgements    ix

and colleagues, for being wonderful: Hanna Delitsch, Camilla Järborg, Hilda Jakobsson, Somaya Ghanem, Josefin Sundqvist, Ally Crockford, Stephanie Spoto, Maja Milatovic, Nadine Jassat, Emily Martin, Jacq Kelly, Ellie Hutchinson, Sarah Galletly, Muireann Crowley, Georgina Rannard and all you others – there is not enough room here to thank everyone, but you know who you are. I owe much gratitude to my family: my grandparents, especially farmor Elsie whom I miss so much; my wonderful parents Britt and Kjell Wånggren, who are always there for me; my sisters and brother whom I treasure more than words can say: Maria, Nina and Niklas (and siblings-­in-­law Pa Mass, Matti and Marta); and, of course, hugs and love to Omadi and Momodou. An earlier version of part of Chapter 3 appeared as ‘The “Freedom Machine”: The New Woman and the Bicycle’ in Transport in British Fiction: Technologies of Movement, 1840–1940 (2015), and is reprinted here in a revised form. An earlier version of the section on ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’ in Chapter 5 appeared as ‘“The Doctors of Hoyland”: Gender and Modernity in Conan Doyle’s Medical Stories’ in an OScholars special issue on Arthur Conan Doyle (2015), and is reprinted here in a revised form.

Series Editor’s Preface

‘Victorian’ is a term, at once indicative of a strongly determined concept and an often notoriously vague notion, emptied of all meaningful content by the many journalistic misconceptions that persist about the inhabitants and cultures of the British Isles and Victoria’s Empire in the nineteenth century. As such, it has become a by-­word for the assumption of various, often contradictory habits of thought, belief, behaviour and perceptions. Victorian studies and studies in nineteenth-­century literature and culture have, from their institutional inception, questioned narrowness of presumption, pushed at the limits of the nominal definition, and have sought to question the very grounds on which the unreflective perception of the so-­called Victorian has been built; and so they continue to do. Victorian and nineteenth-­century studies of literature and culture maintain a breadth and diversity of interest, of focus and inquiry, in an interrogative and intellectually open-­minded and challenging manner, which are equal to the exploration and inquisitiveness of its subjects. Many of the questions asked by scholars and researchers of the innumerable productions of nineteenth-­century society actively put into suspension the clichés and stereotypes of ‘Victorianism’, whether the approach has been sustained by historical, scientific, philosophical, empirical, ideological or theoretical concerns; indeed, it would be incorrect to assume that each of these approaches to the idea of the Victorian has been, or has remained, in the main exclusive, sealed off from the interests and engagements of other approaches. A vital interdisciplinarity has been pursued and embraced, for the most part, even as there has been contest and debate amongst Victorianists, pursued with as much fervour as the affirmative exploration between different disciplines and differing epistemologies put to work in the service of reading the ­nineteenth century. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture aims to take up both the debates and the inventive approaches and departures from conven-

Series Editor’s Preface    xi

tion that studies in the nineteenth century have witnessed for the last half century at least. Aiming to maintain a ‘Victorian’ (in the most positive sense of that motif) spirit of inquiry, the series’ purpose is to continue and augment the cross-­ fertilisation of interdisciplinary approaches, and to offer, in addition, a number of timely and untimely revisions of Victorian literature, culture, history and identity. At the same time, the series will ask questions concerning what has been missed or improperly received, misread, or not read at all, in order to present a multi-­faceted and heterogeneous kaleidoscope of representations. Drawing on the most provocative, thoughtful and original research, the series will seek to prod at the notion of the ‘Victorian’, and in so doing, principally through theoretically and epistemologically sophisticated close readings of the historicity of literature and culture in the nineteenth century, to offer the reader provocative insights into a world that is at once overly familiar and irreducibly different, other and strange. Working from original sources, primary documents and recent interdisciplinary theoretical models, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture seeks not simply to push at the boundaries of research in the nineteenth century, but also to inaugurate the persistent erasure and provisional, strategic redrawing of those borders. Julian Wolfreys

Introduction

And I heard a sound of something cracking, and I looked, and I saw the band that bound the burden on to her back broken asunder; and the burden rolled on to the ground.   And I said, ‘What is this?’   And he said, ‘The Age-­of-­muscular-­force is dead. The Age-­of-­nervous-­force has killed him with the knife he holds in his hand; and silently and invisibly he has crept up to the woman, and with that knife of Mechanical Invention he has cut the band that bound the burden to her back. The Inevitable Necessity is broken. She must rise now.’ Olive Schreiner, ‘Three Dreams in a Desert’ (1891: 71–2) The close of the nineteenth century marks an epoch of social revolutions! Humanity is borne more and more rapidly along on the course of the ever-­ widening, the ever-­swifter flowing stream of progress, through scene after scene of novelty, where stupendous events and marvellous discoveries and inventions crowd thickly one upon another. . . . [M]ore discussed, debated, newspaper paragraphed, caricatured, howled down and denied, or acknowledged and approved, as the case may be, than any of them, we have the new woman . . . immeasurably the first in importance, the most abounding in potentialities and in common interest. Mrs Morgan-­Dockrell, ‘Is the New Woman a Myth?’ (1896: 339–40)

In Olive Schreiner’s 1890 short story ‘Three Dreams in a Desert’, the narrator, having fallen asleep under a mimosa tree, experiences in three dreams an allegorical journey from slavery to emancipation. In the first dream the narrator finds herself in a desert, in which she encounters the figure of a woman lying motionless in the sand, bound by chains and weakened by ages of subordination. But after having her chains cut off by ‘Mechanical Invention’, the woman staggers to her knees, and continues towards emancipation; the other two dreams see the narrator journey through a purgatorial river, and then arrive at a heavenly future. This book focuses on just what cuts off the woman’s chains in Schreiner’s allegory: that ‘Mechanical Invention’ of the late nineteenth

2    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

century. Mrs Morgan-­Dockrell in the Humanitarian names the ‘course of the ever-­ widening, the ever-­ swifter flowing stream of progress, through scene after scene of novelty, where stupendous events and marvellous discoveries and inventions crowd thickly one upon another’ (1896: 339). The Victorian fin de siècle meant social revolutions and restructurings, both in terms of gender and technology; Schreiner’s dream suggests a clear connection between the revision of gender roles and the new technologies of the time. More discussed than any of the novelties and transformations of the late nineteenth century, as Morgan-­Dockrell remarks, is the New Woman: ‘immeasurably the first in importance, the most abounding in potentialities and in common interest’ (1896: 340). Indeed, the New Woman is one of the most well-­known figures of the Victorian fin de siècle. While there were many versions circulating of this new or modern womanhood, the most common or stereotypical figuration is that of the emancipated, smoking and bicycling Girton Girl (Girton being the recently opened Cambridge college for women) insisting on rational dress or even bloomers. The New Woman writer Sarah Grand in 1894 defines ‘the new woman’ as the woman who is above the man, and who has ‘solved the problem and proclaimed for herself what was wrong with Home-­is-­the-­Woman’s-­sphere, and prescribed the remedy’ (142). The New Woman, this fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-­century debates concerning issues as diverse as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the context of the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time (see Chapter 1), the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine, alongside changing publishing structures. This book examines the New Woman in the specific technological modernity of the late nineteenth century, considering the figure as connecting not only contemporary social, political and literary debates, but also technological transformations. Drawing attention to specific New Woman writings from fiction and the periodical press, the book maps a crucial link between technological advances of the time and the changing notions of gender formulated in this figure of early feminism. Through examining works by authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin, read in the larger context of late Victorian popular and British New Woman fiction (c. 1887–1903), the book considers how new figurations of gender and technology enabled women and men of the late nineteenth century to occupy previously barred spaces and roles. Reading the New Woman

Introduction    3

in terms of the figure’s connection to technologies and social practices of the time provides a way of understanding how certain technologies come to work as ‘freedom machines’, as visual emblems connected to the New Woman and signifying female emancipation. The New Woman is thus tied to the social and material changes taking place in late nineteenth-­ century modernity, a period which involved not only new technologies, increased bureaucracy and changing institutional structures, but also new literary and writing practices. Novels, periodicals and professional publications of the time produce many instances of the New Woman figure; they play a crucial part in articulating the concept. Indeed, David Rubenstein claims that ‘never before had literature and fiction contributed so much to the feminist movement as it did at the fin de siècle’ (1986: 24). Although women’s rights campaigners of the 1890s are often overlooked, he argues, it was in this decade that women first took an important role in party political activity, through the agency of political organisations established in the 1880s. Indeed, Rubenstein names the 1890s ‘“the women’s decade”’ and considers these years as the first stage in ‘an enduring campaign’ for women’s rights, a campaign ‘aided by’ the literary flowering of the period (xv, xii). However, the literature of the period does not merely ‘aid’ a possible political cause, neither is it simply a ‘product’ of one, but it formulates and takes part in creating this cause. Writing itself, in its material – literal – sense, is noticeably a technology. In addition, writing and literature become cultural technologies for producing meaning: in shaping ideas, norms and politics in a society. Jane Tompkins names this agency of texts the ‘cultural work’ of literature, referring to the ways in which literary texts attempt to ‘redefine the social order’ by providing alternative visions of society (1985: xi). This expanded meaning of writing entails the ways in which works of literature produce, reproduce and negotiate social formations, shape history, and act as ‘agents of cultural formation’ (Tompkins 1985). Writing can here be seen as a discursive and social practice; literary texts as not simply reflecting but also shaping contemporary opinion. Literature and the social world thus cannot be considered separately, as literature does not merely reflect social relations, but rather also constructs and changes them. In the case of the New Woman this coupling of literary texts and the social world is central, as the figure of the New Woman is at the same time a fictional construct and a sociohistorical phenomenon; the figure simultaneously is made out of and makes up the debate, emerging in both a literary and in a historical context. Textual and visual figurations – that is to say literary texts and illustrations – negotiate, or rework, established notions of gender.

4    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

Focusing on the growing literary market and technological modernisation of the late nineteenth century, this book considers works of New Woman writing alongside debates in the periodical and professional press. The book is structured around three main technologies of crucial importance to the changing gender roles of the time: the typewriter, the safety bicycle and medical technologies. This structure signals correspondingly a contention over certain spaces, as these various technologies employed by women signified means of entering novel domains. It is not merely the technologies themselves that challenge established gender roles, threatening to ‘unsex’ the New Woman (a common warning of the time), but also the entry of women into new territories previously reserved for men. Rather than the movement of New Women simply occurring in, through or across space, this movement also reshapes or constructs space: ‘Since space is the product of social relations’, as Doreen Massey writes, to move also means ‘to alter space, to participate in its continuing production’ (2005: 118). Spatial structure and social structure thus constitute each other: as ‘spaces reflect social norms, they also embody gender relations’ (Spain 2014: 582). Women’s mobility is in this way tied to questions of female agency and social transformation; indeed, as Rita Felski notes, ‘the emancipation of women is presented as inseparably linked to their movement into the workplace and the public sphere’ (1994: 151). The chapters in this book not only consider the technologies but also the spaces connected with the New Woman: the typewriter signifies a female entry into the office space, the bicycle allows for both geographical and to an extent social mobility as women were able to move unchaperoned outdoors, and medical tools and the clinical hospital institution enabled women to enter the medical professional sphere. The final chapter brings together previous chapters by considering the figure of the New Woman detective, who through her use of modern technologies in literary texts prefigures women’s entry into British law enforcement by decades. Through the New Woman’s linking of social and spatial restructurings, via engagements with new technologies, the figure can be seen as a precursor and inspiration to the suffrage movement. Martha Vicinus emphasises the ways in which the suffragettes later used ‘the metaphors of space and the body – the private and the public, the female body and the body politics’ to support their arguments: ‘each action of the militant campaign was symbolic of the state of women’ (1985: 252). The most revolutionary aspect of the suffrage movement, it can be argued, was precisely the ‘insistence upon a female presence – even leadership – in male arenas’; claiming male space for women’s purposes (Vicinus 1985: 264). Indeed, Vicinus includes an incident recounted by a suffragette,

Introduction    5

from an imprisonment in 1909, describing a recital of Schreiner’s above-­quoted ‘Three Dreams in a Desert’ (1890). This allegorical short story seemed to the prisoners ‘a bare literal description of the pilgrimage of women. It fell on our ears more like an A B C railway guide to our journey than a figurative parable’ (qtd in Vicinus 1985: 273). As metaphor and practice intertwine, New Woman writing is taken up and employed as a guide for their work; Schreiner here supplies the suffragettes with a political allegory. Literary texts thus contribute to debates regarding gendered spaces in the late nineteenth century, as well as gendered uses of technology, coming to work as social and cultural agents. However, while now canonical New Woman writers such as Sarah Grand, Mona Caird, George Egerton and Olive Schreiner in their works explore the ideals and ideas of the late nineteenth-­century women’s movement, partaking in debates around marriage, female sexuality and independence, they less often use material technologies of the late nineteenth century to signal the modern character of their heroines. Instead, such writers often explore new forms of writing female subjectivity, through interior monologues, experimental, realist and protomodernist narrative styles, including revolting against ‘the paternalistic authority of an omniscient narrator’ (Ardis 1990: 68). In its anticipation of literary modernism, such New Woman writing employs a kind of new technology of writing, showcasing its modern ‘newness’ through formal experiments rather than through depicting material technologies of the time in a realist fashion. For instance, while both Sarah Grand and Olive Schreiner were keen cyclists, there are not many literary figurations of the stereotypical New Woman cyclist in their works.1 While New Woman writers such as George Egerton and Kate Chopin indeed include female literary bicyclists among their work, the focus of these authors lies in exploring the inner workings and complexity of women struggling for independence. This attention to human interiority rather than to material circumstances as subject matter might also be linked to the class or occupation of characters constructed in the texts: as New Woman heroines from the upper-­middle or upper classes may not have to seek paid work, such narratives less often focus on the working lives of, for example, typists or nurses.2 While the book underscores works by these writers in the respective chapters, the focus lies on writing in which technologies of the time are used as visual emblems for female emancipation. This coupling of technologies and early feminism is most clearly formulated in popular or specifically commercial New Woman writing. While New Woman writing has been studied for its narrative and formal innovations, this book focuses on the newness not primarily

6    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

of aesthetics but of subject matter. While some critics have dismissed less experimental narrative modes as insufficiently feminist, there is no ‘automatic correlation’ between a particular aesthetic and a specific politics; as Sally Ledger notes, to value a modernist aesthetic at the expense of more traditional modes of writing is ‘counter-­productive, in terms both of a feminist politics and a feminist critical practice’ (Ledger 1997: 193; see also Felski 1989). Indeed, it may be that popular forms of culture, by being so striking that they almost become invisible or obvious in retrospect, may require ‘more intense critical analysis than do “higher” art forms, because they have so subtly invaded and ordered massive, unsorted psychic and cultural materials from the historical moment in which they appeared’ (Thomas 1999: 5). While Schreiner’s formally experimental Story of an African Farm (1883) is often regarded as the first New Woman novel, this line of protomodernist New Woman literature can also be sided with a more popular one: that of the commercially-­minded Grub Street writer’s work. Writers such as Grant Allen, George Gissing, H. G. Wells and L. T. Meade in their commercial fiction invoke specific visual tropes of the fin de siècle, probably in part to increase publication figures by referring to the striking image of the New Woman. Seemingly different in form and to an extent content matter, the heart of the New Woman debate appears also in these works: issues such as marriage reform, civil and educational rights, and gender equality. By associating the New Woman figure with modernity and newness through her use of the modern technologies of the time, these writers simultaneously imbue the technologies with a social and cultural value. While not the main focus of this book, the link between ‘modern’ technologies of the late nineteenth century and imperialism must be noted. While, as this book argues, technology is often used as an emblem of emancipation for the New Woman, as a sign of the figure’s newness and progressive character, it also often marks her as specifically British or Western, or ‘civilised’. In many ways, modern technology was often used at the time as a ‘reason’ for imperialist nations to colonise other nations, ‘bringing’ the railway to various parts of the world; indeed, the term ‘civilisation’ is still today associated with technological development. Much British commercial fiction of the late nineteenth century partakes directly in the imperial project of the time, alongside the pseudoscientific racist theories of the time (Brantlinger 1988; McClintock 1995), and this includes New Woman fiction. Indeed, as Anne McClintock notes, ‘white women were not the hapless onlookers of empire but were ambiguously complicit both as colonizers and colonized, privileged and restricted, acted upon and acting’ (1995: 6).

Introduction    7

As recent New Woman critics note, the doubling in size of the British Empire between 1875 and 1914 coincides with the increase in movements for women’s rights, with imperialist narratives often becoming part of New Woman writings (Jusová 2005). The works analysed in this book present various examples of such an ‘imperialist feminism’ expressed through the New Woman’s use of technology. Published during the Boer War (1899–1902), the major event which questioned British rule over South Africa, both Miss Cayley’s Adventures and Hilda Wade spend considerable time justifying the British imperial project. In Miss Cayley’s Adventures (Chapter 3), for instance, the technologically proficient New Woman Lois travels around the world on British-­engineered steam-­powered railway and boat to colonised and occupied territories such as India and Egypt; indeed, the novel’s front cover shows Lois standing with one foot on the top of a big globe signalling the Earth. While Lois and other characters ridicule anti-­ European xenophobia by exposing one character’s prejudices against French and German people, the ‘Oriental’ nations and peoples are not given the same treatment. Employing racist and islamophobic stereotypes through a kind of ‘feminist Orientalism’ (Zonana 1993), Lois in her modern Englishness saves a fellow white Englishwoman who has been captured by Muslim Egyptians, while in India she goes tiger-­ hunting while wearing her modern bicycling outfit. When running a typewriting office in Italy, this hyperbolic New Woman heroine discusses British foreign policy in the Middle East, agreeing with her customer’s call for further British exploits in the Middle East to include Syria and Palestine (1899: 157–9). Meanwhile, in Hilda Wade (1900) (Chapter 4) the New Woman nurse, when in southern Africa, flees African rebels by bicycling away from them, Hilda’s machine signalled by the narrator as conspicuously modern against the ‘uncivilised’ non-­technological background. In Hilda Gregg’s Peace with Honour (1897) (Chapter 5), the colonial New Woman doctor’s medical skills and modern instruments become a sign of supposed British superiority over the Ethiopian patients. Furthermore, in Chapter 6 we see pseudoscientific racist theories used by law enforcement to delineate criminality along classed and racialised lines. The New Woman here does the cultural work not only of early British feminism, but also of imperialism. The structure of this book, as outlined earlier, signals a contention over not only gendered uses of technologies but also over certain spaces. Chapter 1 places the New Woman figure in the literary and historical context of the late nineteenth century, outlining the theoretical and methodological premises of the book, in order to consider the ‘semi-­ fictionality’ of the New Woman. Chapter 2 examines the case of the

8    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

typewriter, which proved one of the most significant means for women to enter the offices at the Victorian fin de siècle, and which quickly became associated with female emancipation. Following this, Chapter 3 examines the bicycle’s position as a technology of democratisation, a ‘freedom machine’ which quickly became synonymous with movements for social progress, in particular women’s rights. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on two sorts of medical New Women: doctors and nurses. The chapters note the emergence of the institutional technology of the clinical hospital, through which medical women became associated with the knowledge and tools functioning to legitimate medical science as ‘scientific’. Chapter 4 considers the medical New Women who entered new spaces and roles as nurses, whereas Chapter 5 examines women’s entry into the medical sphere as doctors, considering gendered debates around medical authority and professionalism. Chapter 6 concludes the book by examining the figure of the New Woman detective and the specific technologies of detection employed: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, the telegraph and the telephone, and photography. The specific technologies examined in these chapters could be accompanied by various other technologies of the time. New Woman writers’ engagements with modern technologies of communication, transport and media further include technologies such as the telegraph, the telephone, the railway, omnibuses and photography. While examining these manifold interactions with gender and technologies would extend far beyond the scope of this book, a brief sketch of the possibilities presented by such technologies is called for. In addition to the typewriter, other office and communications technologies such as the telegraph, the telephone, systems of phonography and even the postal system could be included. For example, in Anthony Trollope’s short story ‘The Telegraph Girl’ (1877) the woman worker feels a sense of independence in her role, compared to working as a member of household staff. While Thomas Hardy is mostly read in the New Woman canon because of novels such as Jude the Obscure (1895) with its unconventional heroine Sue Brideshead, his earlier A Laodicean (1881) provides a more visual figuration of changing social and gender structures. In this novel the protofeminist heroine Paula Power – one character remarks that she should rather be called ‘Miss Steam-­Power’ (1881: vol. 1, 305) – is characterised through new technologies of the time. Indeed, Paula’s lover Somerset describes this New Woman as representing ‘“the march of mind – the steamship, and the railway, and the thoughts that shake mankind”’ (vol. 1, 184). Paula represents ‘a modern type of maidenhood’ and is said to embody ‘the antagonistic modern spirit’ through her advanced views on matters such as higher education

Introduction    9

and physical exercise for women (vol. 1, 25; vol. 2, 61). The daughter of a wealthy railway magnate, Paula is the sole inheritor of the ancient De Stancy Castle, which she is determined to restore and modernise. Being of a modern frame of mind, she has the telegraph connected to the castle. Even later, when telegraphs were no longer a novelty, they might still be used to challenge social roles. In Henry James’s novella about a telegraph office, In the Cage (1898), a young working-­class telegraphist is able to enter the life of an upper-­class customer, through her insight into the intimate messages that he sends. While the telephone is not given as much space as the telegraph in British late nineteenth-­century writing, it features in New Woman works such as Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman (1894) and Emily Morse Symonds’ (pseud. George Paston) A Writer of Books (1898), functioning in these fictions as a ‘kind of imaginative switchboard’ connecting new technologies to older ones (Menke 2013: 214). Transports such as the omnibus, the underground and later motor vehicles could be included along with the bicycle. Trains and railways feature throughout Victorian literature not only as signs of technological or economic development, but as cultural metaphors of modernity, made evident through women travelling unaccompanied in trains. Towards the end of the century, new freedoms can be found via the London omnibuses. As Ana Parejo Vadillo (2005) suggests, women’s urban transport by omnibus and underground by the end of the century replaced the figure of the modern flâneuse or streetwalker as an emblem of modernity. Alison in Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman (1894) describes the pleasures of riding on top of Parisian omnibuses, while the main character Mary navigates London not only by foot but also through omnibuses and the underground. The main characters of Netta Syrett’s Nobody’s Fault (1896), Grand’s The Beth Book (1897) and Symonds’ A Writer of Books similarly enjoy the freedom of London omnibuses, as do characters in Amy Levy’s poem ‘Ballade of an Omnibus’ (1889) and in her novel The Romance of a Shop (1888). Levy’s novel features a conventional aunt shocked by the New Woman heroine’s modern mode of transport, which here also includes the London underground. Literary and cultural figurations of the New Woman involve additional media technologies such as photography, the phonograph and film-­making. The sisters Lorimer in Levy’s The Romance of a Shop (1888) are characterised as distinctly modern by their decision to open a photographer’s studio. As Deborah Epstein Nord (1995: 200) has noted, The Romance of a Shop anticipates George Gissing’s 1893 typewriter-­girl novel The Odd Women (explored in Chapter 2), in that

10    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

they both explore the situation of ‘odd’ or superfluous (mostly middle-­ class) women claiming their right to work, and their newly found freedom of movement in public spaces. Similarly to Rhoda Nunn and Mary Barfoot of The Odd Women, the three younger Lorimer sisters who manage the studio share emancipated views on work and life; with their ‘intensely modern young eyes’ (12), they are happy to accompany unknown men home for photography work, and delight in the freedom of mobility offered by the London omnibuses and underground. These sisters are contrasted with their older sister, who is not involved in the trade but functions as their housekeeper, and who stands out as being ‘behind the age’: ‘She was an anachronism, belonging by rights to the period when young ladies played the harp, wore ringlets, and went into hysterics’ (11). Similarly, the New Woman nurse Hilda of Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade (1900, explored in Chapter 4) adds photography to her many skills to mark her as a modern woman, alongside bicycling and nursing. Arthur Conan Doyle’s first short story in the Strand Magazine, ‘The Voice of Science’ (1891), with the help of a phonograph intervenes in the late nineteenth-­century marriage debate which was so intertwined with the Woman Question. Perhaps the most famous literary phonograph is the one used by Dr Seward in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the recordings of which are then typed up by New Woman secretary Mina Harker. These are but a few examples demonstrating the period’s literary engagement with modern technologies. Literature of the time is inevitably caught up not only in changing structures of gender, sexuality, class and race, but also in late nineteenth-­ century technological modernity. Through literary texts – especially popular fiction and the periodical press – technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle and medical inventions come to work as visual emblems of the New Woman, setting into motion specific narratives concerning gender and emancipation. Examining late nineteenth-­century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, the book marks the crucial role of that ‘Mechanical Invention’ highlighted by Schreiner, in social and literary struggles for equality at the end of the nineteenth century.

Notes 1. Schreiner, famous for the spiritual independence of her literary heroines and for her protomodernist writing style, and often seen as one of the earliest New Woman writers, herself employed many of the technologies examined in this book: she had a typewriter, rode a bicycle, and wanted to become a nurse or doctor.

Introduction    11 2. The New Woman is still largely framed as white, middle-­class, and either British (most often English) or North American, although recent scholarship has explored the diversity of the figure. As Marion Shaw and Lyssa Randolph note, whether ‘as a concept or as a reality’, the New Woman was primarily a (white) middle-­class phenomenon (2007: 4), and working-­class women and destitute women are largely missing from New Woman writings. Indeed, class-­related social hierarchies in much New Woman writing ‘remain largely unchallenged by the very women (authors and characters) who struggle so hard to overcome sexual inequalities’ (Heilmann 2000: 98).

Chapter 1

The New Woman in Technological Modernity

The Victorian fin de siècle was, as Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst note, an epoch marked by the collision between old and new, the Victorian and the Modern (2000: xiii).1 Max Nordau comments in Degeneration (1892, English translation 1895) on the immense changes that had swept through Western Europe with the industrialisation of society and its effects on humanity: All its conditions of life have, in this period of time, experienced a revolution unexampled in the history of the world. Humanity can point to no century in which the inventions which penetrate so deeply, so tyrannically, into the life of every individual are crowded so thick as in ours. . . . In our times . . . steam and electricity have turned the customs of life of every member of the civilized nations upside down. (1993: 37)

Arguably, never before had such great social and political changes, coupled with advances in technology and new cultural movements, happened in such a short period of time. In literary culture, Raymond Williams classified the years from 1880 to 1914 as an ‘interregnum’, claiming that rather than doing ‘anything very new’, the artists and writers of the period represented ‘a working-­out, rather, of unfinished lines; a tentative redirection’ (1963: 165). However, more recently the late nineteenth century has come to be considered not merely as an ‘age of transition’ between Victorian and modernist eras, but as a literary and cultural period in itself (Keating 1989: 1).2 As Lyn Pykett notes, the last few decades have seen the construction of a ‘new’ fin de siècle which is increasingly regarded as ‘a distinctive and diverse cultural moment rather than as a limbo-­like “age of transition”’ (1996: 3). Fin de siècle modernity involved not only the technological and industrial changes decried by Nordau, but also changes in literary and cultural climate. Distinct fin de siècle characters such as the Aesthete and the New Woman, artistic movements such as decadence and aestheticism, and specific discourses on gender, sexuality and empire emerged in this era of

The New Woman in Technological Modernity    13

commercialisation of literature. Alongside changes such as the increase in periodicals and magazines, the emergence of organised literary agents and the figure of the Grub Street author, the New Woman became a popular literary motif and subject matter.3 This chapter places the New Woman figure in the literary and historical context of the late nineteenth century, and outlines the theoretical and methodological premises of the book. Defining key terms such as modernity, technology and gender, the chapter asserts that in order to describe fin de siècle modernity, one must take into account not only the technological changes or specific advances of the time, but in addition the role played by contemporary notions of gender, and the cultural work of literature in changing such notions. Through a discussion of the figure of the New Woman alongside theories of technology, the chapter problematises gynocritical readings of literature as well as determinist theories of technology. Just as literature gains significance first in connection to other agencies – such as a reader – so technology also takes on specific meanings first when considered in a social context.

Fin de Siècle Modernity and the ‘Crisis in Gender’ Contrary to Williams’s claim that the 1890s did not represent ‘anything very new’, to the late Victorians themselves the fin de siècle was bursting with a sense of the new and the modern. Rita Felski in The Gender of Modernity notes that the idea of the modern ‘saturates the discourses, images, and narratives’ of the fin de siècle. Felski describes modernity as thus referring not only to a wide range of sociohistorical phenomena – capitalism, bureaucracy, technological development – but above all to certain experiences of temporality and historical consciousness (1995: 9). Holbrook Jackson notes that alongside the prevailing use of the phrase fin de siècle came the adjective ‘new’, which was applied in much the same way to ‘indicate extreme modernity’ (1922: 21). Just a few examples of its applications are the ‘New Spirit’, the ‘New Realism’, the ‘New Hedonism’, the ‘New Drama’ and the ‘New Journalism’. Modernity here involves a consciousness of newness or of living in a new era, taking on an amplified form in the fin de siècle. While modernity reconfigured social relations already before the 1890s, not until now were journalists and periodicals to such an extent labelling these changes as ‘new’ or modern. One of these newnesses was the New Woman, one of the most well-­known and debated figures of the fin de siècle. As quoted in the Introduction, Mrs Morgan-­ Dockrell states in 1896 that while the

14    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

‘very word “new,” strikes as it were the dominant note in the trend of present-­day thought . . . [o]f all these new facts and entities, the new woman appears . . . to be immeasurably the first in importance, the most abounding in potentialities and in common interest’ (1896: 339–40). Augustin Filon in his 1897 book on Victorian drama similarly calls the New Woman an ‘obsessing phantom of which everyone speaks and which so few have seen’ (1897: 231). Olive Schreiner, herself a New Woman writer, observes in Woman and Labour (1911, but first written in the 1890s) that ‘[m]uch is said at the present day on the subject of the “New Woman” . . . On every hand she is examined, praised, blamed, mistaken for her counterfeit, ridiculed, or deified – but nowhere can it be said, that the phenomenon of her existence is overlooked’ (1978: 252–3). Focalising issues of gender at the fin de siècle, the New Woman figure stood at the centre of many debates. New Woman fiction had been published before the term itself was coined, many critics considering Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm (1883) as the earliest example. W. T. Stead writes in The Review of Reviews in 1894 that ‘[t]he Modern Woman, par excellence, the founder and high priestess of the school, is Olive Schreiner. Her “Story of an African Farm” has been the forerunner of all the novels of the Modern Woman’ (1894: 64). Schreiner’s unconventional heroine Lyndall can be seen as a prototype of the New Woman, as can Henrik Ibsen’s female characters in plays such as A Doll’s House (1879, first produced in London 1889) and Hedda Gabler (1890, London 1891). The naming of the New Woman had been preceded by debates on the ‘Woman Question’ for many years; prior to 1894 she had been called among other names Novissima, the Odd or Wild Woman, the Superfluous or Redundant Woman (Ardis 1990: 10). Likewise, so-­called ‘real’ New Women certainly had earlier engaged in social practices later ascribed to the New Woman, such as attending university, riding a bicycle, wearing rational dress and smoking; but the New Woman as concept or literary trope did not yet exist. The term New Woman was popularised through Sarah Grand’s essay ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’, published in March 1894 in North American Review.4 Here Grand coins the term ‘the new woman’ to signify the woman who is above the man, and who has ‘solved the problem and proclaimed for herself what was wrong with Home-­is-­the-­Woman’s-­sphere, and prescribed the remedy’ (1894: 142). Some months later, Ouida (pen-­name for Marie Louise de la Ramée) responded to Grand with the essay ‘The New Woman’. Here Ouida, while criticising the New Woman and her enterprise, capitalised the term: ‘the New Woman with her fierce vanity, her undigested knowledge, her over-­weening estimate of her own value and her fatal want of

The New Woman in Technological Modernity    15

all sense of the ridiculous’ (1894: 615). While critics such as Ann Ardis (1990) characterise the naming of the New Woman as a containment of the figure’s radical potential, by turning a multifaceted debate regarding women’s rights into a literary one, others note the naming of the New Woman as increasing the figure’s political possibilities. As Talia Schaffer argues, the New Woman is turned into a literary product ‘not to contain her, but to expand her’ (2001: 43). Within months the New Woman was a well-­known figure, heatedly debated and ridiculed in the press. The satirical poem ‘The New Woman’, published in Punch, or the London Charivari only two months after Grand’s naming of the New Woman, confirms the omnipresence of the figure in popular discourse. The figure is discussed and debated widely, as the ‘nagging New Woman’ refuses to be quiet: There is a New Woman, and what do you think? She lives upon nothing but Foolscap and Ink! But, though Foolscap and Ink form the whole of her diet, This nagging New Woman can never be quiet! (1894: 252)

The poem articulates the New Woman as a discursive or textual figuration, living upon nothing but ‘Foolscap and Ink’. The ‘Foolscap’ here refers to the paper format onto which the figure is written, but it also has the double meaning of the fool’s or jester’s cap. In another satirical Punch poem entitled ‘Misoneogyny’, ‘A. Bachelor’ argues that the New Woman is a decadent monster of no lasting vitality, Only existing in fancy and print; It is just an unlovely abstract personality, Coin from the end-­of-­the-­century mint. (1895: 35)

Both these satirical poems characterise the New Woman as a textual or fictional construct, which exists only ‘in fancy and print’, ridiculing the figure but also opening up a discursive space for debates on gender. A stereotyped image of the New Woman soon emerged: ‘She was educated at Girton College, Cambridge, rode a bicycle, insisted on rational dress, and smoked in public: in short, she rejected the traditional role for women and demanded emancipation’ (Christensen Nelson 2001: ix). Gail Finney gives a fuller characterisation, calling the New Woman ‘a literary type’ who values self-­fulfilment and independence rather than the stereotypically feminine ideal of self-­sacrifice; believes in legal and sexual equality; often remains

16    Gender, Technology and the New Woman single because of the difficulty of combining such equality with marriage; is more open about her sexuality than the ‘Old Woman’; is well-­educated and reads a great deal; has a job; is athletic or otherwise physically vigorous and, accordingly, prefers comfortable clothes (sometimes male attire) to traditional female garb. (1994: 95–6)

Questioning the established separation of spheres into a female private and a male public one, the New Woman moved into offices, literary markets, universities, hospitals and shops. Locating the New Woman in a wider context, the figure can be placed within the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ that occurred at the close of the nineteenth century, when ‘all the laws that governed sexual identity and behavior seemed to be breaking down’ (Showalter 1992: 3). Sally Ledger maintains that gender was the most destabilised category of the cultural politics of the fin de siècle, and ‘it was the force of gender as a site of conflict which drew such virulent attacks upon the figure of the New Woman’ (1997: 2). As Elaine Showalter notes, the ‘redefinition of gender’ that took place at the end of the century concerned men as well as women. New Women and decadent artists were linked together ‘as twin monsters of a degenerate age’; they were ‘sexual anarchists’ who blurred the gender boundaries (1992: 8; 1993: x). Sydney Grundy’s 1894 play The New Woman articulates this notion of ‘sexual anarchy’, as the Colonel states to his friend Sylvester: ‘These people are a sex of their own, Sylvester. They have invented a new gender’ (1894: 300). The debates concerning men’s and women’s places were thus focalised in the concept of the New Woman. The New Woman became the focal figure for debates not only concerning gender. Many of the current discussions came together in the New Woman; debates on science, evolution and degeneration, gender and sexuality, race and empire, and modernity. Fears and anxieties of the time, as well as hopes and possibilities, can be found in this proto-­and early feminist figure. Carroll Smith-­ Rosenberg calls the New Woman ‘a condensed symbol of disorder and rebellion’ (1985: 247), a trope or figure to be ‘invoked and appropriated’ to represent whatever was modern and subversive in new ideas of femininity (Shaw and Randolph 2007: 8). Through the intense and prolonged debates the figure engendered, as Ann Heilmann notes, the New Woman ‘shaped central aspects of British literature and culture from the late Victorian age through the Edwardian period and beyond’ (2000: 1–2). The debates of the 1890s were not simply divided in leagues supporting or opposing the New Woman and her demands, but consisted rather of many diverse voices. Peter Keating notes that the New Woman writers ‘did not constitute a school of writers in any formal sense, and,

The New Woman in Technological Modernity    17

once reviewers and critics had given them a collective image, it was not necessary to be a woman to write a New Woman novel’ (1989: 189). What, then, qualifies as New Woman writing? Carolyn Christensen Nelson defines New Woman fiction as works characterised by the ‘representation of strong heroines who rebel against the limitations placed on their lives and demand the same education and economic opportunities as men enjoy’, which emphasises women’s sexuality and psychology, and provides complex and often negative portrayals of marriage (2001: xii). New Woman novels, short stories and dramas most often have politically conscious and self-­supporting women as main characters, who challenge the idea of gendered separate spheres in society. Despite this broad definition, New Woman scholarship has at times disagreed on what counts at New Woman writing. Some critics have tended to name certain novels and novelists as ‘anti-­feminist’ or ‘feminist’, often relying on the gender of the author to define which camp they belong in. In this way, much New Woman scholarship has relied on gynocriticism – the study of women writers as a distinct literary tradition – to structure readings of the New Woman figure and debates.5 Women writers have by necessity lived in different sociohistorical circumstances than men, and thus can be said to have ‘a literature of their own’, a distinct ‘female literary tradition’ consisting of both formal tradition and shared subject matter (Showalter 1978: 11). Showalter claims that by the 1880s, while male New Woman writers imagined ‘a New Woman who fulfilled their own fantasies of sexual freedom’, female New Woman writers ‘demanded self-­control for men, rather than license for themselves’ (1978: 185). Showalter thus puts forward a gendered division of New Woman writers; female authors harbouring a ‘threatening’ and ‘genuine’ version of the New Woman, while male authors ‘imagined’ a ‘fantasy’ New Woman (185). ‘While feminist women writers challenged the existing structures that underpinned sexual relations,’ Heilmann similarly states, ‘anti-­ feminist men used their novels as a vehicle for the expression of sexual fantasies’ (2000: 53–4). Ledger, too, reads the New Woman debate as separated in two opposed camps, considering the genre of New Woman fiction as a ‘reverse’ discourse, a sense of rupture of the ‘dominant’ discourse of the fin de siècle, a revolt against the ‘particular class (male and bourgeois)’ that ‘held power’ at the fin de siècle (1997: 10). As Vanessa Warne and Colette Colligan note, many critics thus tend to disown male New Woman novelists, some insinuating that ‘a man could but awkwardly promote women’s social and sexual freedom’ (2005: 22). Even if not explicitly spelling out that men could not be advocates of women’s rights, such criticism tends to ‘present the female New Woman novelists

18    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

as the true revolutionaries’ (Warne and Colligan 2005: 44, note 4). This gendered division of New Woman writing, however, which takes into consideration gender but often not other social categories such as class, race or sexuality, threatens to close down the many potential meanings of a literary text. Through Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse as multi-­ sided, complex and containing many voices, New Woman writing and the debates around the figure can be examined without necessarily being reduced to two opposite gendered factions. Joan W. Scott provides a general definition of discourse as ‘a historically, socially, and institutionally specific structure of statements, terms, categories, and beliefs’ (2003: 379). It is in discourse and discursive formations that power and knowledge are joined together, in a ‘complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy’ (Foucault 1998: 100). Discursive formations are not to be seen as fixed but, like power relations, they are mobile and changeable. As Foucault notes, while discourse ‘transmits and produces power; it reinforces it’, it also ‘undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it’ (1998: 101). Indeed, one must not imagine ‘a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies’. Rather, there can exist ‘different and even contradictory discourses’ within the same strategy (1998: 100, 102). Instead of dividing New Woman literature into separate gendered camps of feminist writers and anti-­feminist writers, or in Foucault’s terms as binary discursive systems of dominant and dominated discourse, the genre can be considered as containing multiple – often conflicting – voices. As Marion Shaw and Lyssa Randolph state, both ‘female and male interlocutors’ should be read as an ‘important dialectic in the consideration of the way in which feminist ideas were established and contested in literary culture’ (2007: ix). Readers, writers and the concept of the New Woman itself are part of reproducing, negotiating or undermining discourses at the fin de siècle. Foucault’s mobile and diverse notion of discourse should thus not be read as an all-­encompassing set of strict regulations, divided into two opposite and gendered camps. Rather than looking to the gender of the author, poststructuralist feminist critics have emphasised instead ‘the politics of language as a material and social structure’ (Moi 2002: 15). If feminist criticism is characterised by its political commitment to the struggle against sexist and other forms of oppression, it follows that

The New Woman in Technological Modernity    19

‘the very fact of being female does not necessarily guarantee a feminist approach’: ‘There is not, unfortunately, such a thing as an intrinsically feminist text: given the right historical and social context, all texts can be recuperated by the ruling powers – or appropriated by the feminist opposition’ (Moi 2002: 106, 116). Felski similarly criticises gynocritical approaches which apply such ‘a dualistic model to the analysis of literary texts’, refuting the idea that literature ‘either causes or simply reinforces the oppression of women’ and calling instead for an examination of how ‘ideas, symbols, and myths of gender saturate literary works’ (1989: 27; 2003: 12). Even though there did exist a stereotypical image of the New Woman, the New Woman as category is neither stable nor unified. While certain male authors, such as George Gissing and Grant Allen, present double-­sided and often self-­contradicting views on gender, so do female authors of the time. For instance, two of the major New Woman writers, Mona Caird and Sarah Grand, held opposite views concerning marriage, motherhood and eugenics. New Woman writers held a variety of opinions on social and political issues such as female suffrage, marriage, sexuality, motherhood, class and race politics. What they shared, however, was a rejection of the socially constructed gender role of femininity, a demand for increased educational and career opportunities so that they would be able to earn their own livelihood and thus be economically independent, and a need for social and political reform. Rather than following an idea that literature will involve either containment or empowerment of women (often depending on the gender of the author), we might consider the New Woman debate as made up of ‘discontinuous practices, which cross each other, are juxtaposed with one another, but can just as well exclude or be unaware of each other’ (Foucault 1981: 67). Instead of seeing New Woman writing (or the New Woman debate) as made up of two opposite (gendered) sides, we can study it as different articulations of the same debate. One way of understanding the New Woman’s popularity at the fin de siècle, and the diverse and often contradicting embodiments of the figure, is through the economic context of late nineteenth-­ century literary modernity with its growing demand for commercial fiction. As Elizabeth Carolyn Miller points out, many of the freedoms that the New Woman embodied arose ‘in tandem with consumerism and an accompanying consumerist ideology of individual choice’ (2008: 11). Women became increasingly sexually commodified as femininity became constituted by self-­administered regimes of health, beauty, fashion and appearance. This ‘feminist’ consumer capitalism, Miller argues, shifted the terms of women’s oppression: ‘Women’s bodies shifted from being the property of individual men (such as fathers or husbands), to being social property,

20    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

in need of constant maintenance to meet the new cultural standards of femininity’ (11). In this context, the New Woman became a marketable novelty figure whose presence in a story increased its chance of good sales. As Chris Willis notes, novels and stories in which the heroines were ‘scaled down and prettied up for popular consumption . . . possibly did as much for women’s rights as did the more serious fiction produced by the campaigners’ (2001: 54). Certain authors used popular fiction as a polemic to draw attention to political issues: ‘By marketing the New Woman for mass consumption, the writers of commercial fiction ensured her a prominent and lasting place in popular culture’ (Willis 2001: 64). Indeed, the parodic images in magazines such as Punch also served the New Woman movement’s purpose, by spreading the ideas in the press: ‘For by “naming” and thenceforward largely ridiculing and attacking the New Woman, the editors and hacks of the periodical press unwittingly prised open a discursive space for her’ (Ledger 1997: 10). Commercial fiction and journalism thus play a crucial part in formulating the figure of the New Woman. Considering the New Woman debate as containing many possible meanings, as a discursive formation harbouring many overlapping and conflicting voices, means moving away from a question of whether certain literature is primarily either oppressive or empowering. As Felski notes, literature is ‘double-­sided’; it is ‘not either/or but both/and’ (2003: 12). Rather than assigning ‘an invariant kernel of feminist or misogynist content’ to literary texts, Felski suggests a more ‘historically attuned’ approach which also acknowledges the text’s capacity to ‘challenge or change our own beliefs and commitments’ (2008: 6–7). Taking its cue from Foucault, such an approach would circumvent the problem of secondariness by treating literary texts as formative in their own right, as representations that summon up new ways of seeing rather than as echoes or distortions of predetermined political truths. Espousing what cultural studies calls a politics of articulation, they show how the meanings of texts change as they hook up with different interests and interpretative communities. (2008: 9–10)

Literary texts themselves can in this way avoid occupying a secondary place in the analysis, that is as merely a ‘sign of’ or as representing a historical period or an author’s intention. Throughout this book, New Woman literature is read as made up of a variety of different voices, while debates regarding the female typist, the bicycle, nursing and medical women, are read as parts of discourses made up of multiple, sometimes conflicting, statements.

The New Woman in Technological Modernity    21

New Women, New Technologies Having placed the figure of the New Woman in a literary context as well as in the context of the ‘crisis in gender’ of the late nineteenth century, we place the figure also in a material context through examining the technologies of the time. This section proposes the concept of technology as a way of reading the semi-­fictional New Woman figure in its historiospecific and material context of late nineteenth-­century technological modernity, without closing down the many meanings of its various figurations. New Woman writing bears a twofold character, existing in both a textual or literary and a material sense. Sally Ledger (1997) terms this characteristic the ‘semi-­fictionality’ of the New Woman, in order to describe the ‘epistemological status’ of the New Woman; ‘the precise nature of her relationship to the lived experience of the feminists of the late nineteenth-­century women’s movement’ (Ledger 1997: 3). In other words, the semi-­fictional New Woman figure emerges as both a literary trope and a set of social practices. As Mrs Morgan-­Dockrell notes in 1896, the New Woman exists simultaneously as a ‘figment of the journalistic imagination’ and an ‘altogether new type of woman’: Is the nineteenth century new woman a myth, as so many people aver – a figment of the journalistic imagination . . . ? Is she, indeed, none other than an intensely aggravated type of the unwomanly, unlovable, unlovely, untidy, undomesticated, revolting, shrieking, man-­hating shrew of all the centuries? Or is she on the other hand, verily an altogether new type of woman evolved from out the ages? (1896: 340)

Most New Woman scholarship, belonging to the field of Literary Studies, has naturally focused on the New Woman figure as a literary construction rather than as connected with a set of social practices. Gillian Sutherland (2015) identifies this lack of focus on material circumstances of the New Woman, wondering who the ‘real’ New Women were – the university graduates, medical women and women doing social or charity work, artistic and literary workers, and white-­collar workers in offices or working as school teachers. However, considering the semi-­fictional nature of the New Woman figure, the relationship ‘between the New Woman caricature, the larger attendant literature on the Woman Question and actual social change’ (Sutherland 2015: 8) proves difficult to disentangle. Indeed, New Woman criticism at times struggles with the semi-­fictional nature of the New Woman, and the question of how to conciliate the textual figurations of the New

22    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

Woman with the so-­called ‘real’ or material historical women of the late nineteenth century. While the New Woman was to a great extent a creation of the press, ‘actively produced and reproduced in the pages of the newspaper and periodical press, as well as in novels’ (Pykett 1992: 137–8) or ‘a journalistic phenomenon, a product of discourse’ (Ledger 1997: 3), there were also many ‘real’ women who identified themselves as ‘New Women’, appropriating the term and establishing their own definitions of it. Even if the New Woman did not exist – either as the emancipated intellectual woman of Schreiner’s works, or as the stereotype of commercially minded fiction or the satirical press – there were several ‘New Women’. As Foucault formulates it, discourse should be thought of not simply as a group of signs (signifying elements that refer to contents or representations) or a stretch of text, but as ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault 1989: 54). In other words, just as discourse informs practice, so practice informs discourse: ‘real-­life’ New Women and the literary figurations of the New Woman constitute each other, and cannot be entirely separated. Institutional and textual changes feed into each other; texts are agents in the production of discursive formations, and social practices outline discourse. Novels and other writing simultaneously shape and are shaped by the social world. Even though the figure of the New Woman was a literary trope or abstract concept, there were women engaging in the same social practices, and advocating similar political ideas, as those of this discursive figure. The semi-­fictional character of the New Woman – the figure’s construction through both discourse and social practice – is highlighted in an 1894 satiric illustration entitled ‘Donna Quixote’ (Figure 1.1). In this image, published in Punch, or the London Charivari, the New Woman sits, bespectacled, holding an open book in her left hand and a latchkey (simultaneously the symbol of a woman’s independence and the emblem of John Lane’s Keynote series) in her raised right hand. At her feet are scattered books by Ibsen, Tolstoy and Mona Caird. The caption explains that, like Don Quixote, the woman has been led astray by ‘[a] world of disorderly notion picked out of books, crowded into his (her) imagination’. In the background a Quixote-­like character rides off to fight windmills on which is written ‘MARRIAGE LAWS’, while an Amazonian woman stands ready with a labrys, or double-­bitted axe, to slay both a dragon named ‘DECORUM’ and a beast on whose three heads are illustrated for example ‘MRS GRUNDY’ and ‘CHAPERON’. Another woman is holding a banner on which is written ‘DIVIDED SKIRT’, while a large decapitated head of a bearded man, on whose forefront is written ‘TYRANT MAN’, also lies at the New Woman’s feet. This image shows the fusion of fiction, texts,

The New Woman in Technological Modernity    23

Figure 1.1  ‘Donna Quixote’, Punch, or the London Charivari (28 April 1894).

political demands, discourse and practice, compressed in the figure of the New Woman. Discursive concepts and institutions such as ‘decorum’ and marriage, and social practices such as the wearing of rational dress in the form of a divided skirt, come together in this figure. Focusing on the technological modernity of the fin de siècle alongside

24    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

its literary modernity, thus locating the New Woman figure in a material context, can help us understand the semi-­fictional character of this figuration of late nineteenth-­century feminism. Alongside language, technologies can be said to be the foremost way in which we deal with the material world. As Mark L. Greenberg and Lance Schachterle point out, ‘what makes our daily lives different from what they would have been a generation ago is technology’: ‘Technology supplies most of the artifacts with which we interact every day and the structures we inhabit’ (1992: 14). Conversely, literary texts respond to ‘both the actual technologies and ideas about that technology in the world around them’ (Greenberg and Schachterle 1992: 16). As technology enters every part of society, literature too becomes inextricable from technology in its constituting of the social world: ‘Literature is firmly inserted into the machinic interconnections of a technological world of production, destruction, replication, malfunction, communication, transmission and reception’ (Goody 2011: 2). Late Victorian technologies thus provide a necessary means through which to analyse not just the literary but also the material grounding of the semi-­fictionality of the New Woman, without resorting to discussions of ‘real’ versus ‘fictional’ women and their respective emancipatory potential, or of authorial intention. Technology works as both discursive concept and social practice, linking these two aspects of the figure of the New Woman and thus binding together literary or textual and material elements. Indeed, the New Woman is – in various figurations, both in fiction and journalism of different genres – often connected not only with ideas or concepts, but with specific tools, technologies and practices, which place the figure in a historiospecific technological modernity. Technologies of the time are the main ways in which the figure of the New Woman interacts with the surrounding world. As Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis point out, for much of the mainstream press ‘cycling and rational dress provided visual emblems of the social, sexual and political disquiet caused by women’s demand for equality’ (2001: 24). Technologies of the time embody or materialise late nineteenth-­century social practices, and can be seen as ‘visual emblems’ connecting different figurations of the New Woman. Within this technological framework we can better understand how the discursive figuration of the New Woman emerged in relation to the social world at this specific point in history. The fin de siècle was not only a time of breakdown of ideas c­ oncerning gender and sexual identity, but also a time of much technological change. The 1880s and 1890s saw an incredible upsurge of new technologies including the typewriter, the safety bicycle, medical technologies, the phonograph, wireless telegraphy, the telephone, the X-­ray and

The New Woman in Technological Modernity    25

cinematography. Media theorist Friedrich Kittler describes the change at the end of the nineteenth century from the ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’, a time of monopoly of writing, where everything was filtered through letters and ideograms, to ‘Edison’s Universe’, or ‘Mediengründerzeit’ (1999: 5–6). By Mediengründerzeit Kittler refers to ‘the founding age of technological media’ or the ‘media revolution of 1880’, when the three main modern media technologies recording sound, images and writing – gramophone, film and typewriter – made their entrance and made possible ‘the technological differentiation of optics, acoustics, and writing’ (1999: xl, 16). This technological trinity stored information in new ways, separated the senses and thus, Kittler argues, around 1880 changed human perception by exploding Gutenberg’s writing monopoly, making the ‘fabrication of so-­called Man’ possible (1999: 16). By the term ‘so-­called Man’ Kittler implicitly refers to Foucault’s earlier writings on the ‘death of man’ in The Order of Things (1966), which is Foucault’s critique of a universal subject called ‘man’ as the originator of discourse. Technological modernity also made possible the fabrication of the New Woman, a figure connecting changes in technology and in ideas of gender and social order. What, then, are ‘so-­called’ Man’s, and the New Woman’s, places in relation to these technological and perceptual changes of late nineteenth-­century modernity? The term ‘modernity’ has been assigned numerous meanings, defined as notions both of subjective consciousness and of historical specificity. While modernity cannot be reduced to one single meaning or truly distinctive feature, a focus on technology which ‘may be the truly distinctive feature of modernity’ (Misa 2003: 8) allows the term to be grounded in a historical context. Following Kittler, late nineteenth-­century modernity is seen as bound up with the technological or media revolution of the time. Modernity can thus be seen as an interrelation between technological, perceptual and social changes, including the social category of gender. Gender, that constitutive element of the social, is crucial to exploring technological modernity and its social orderings. As Barbara L. Marshall notes, ‘there is no point at which technology and modernity are not joined in some way in the production of sexual bodies’ (2003: 123). The following chapters of this book explore what happens when the two ‘newnesses’ of the late nineteenth-­century ‘crisis in gender’ and technological modernity – the New Woman and new technologies – come together. As we will find, what is ‘modern’ about late nineteenth-­ century technologies is also their part in reworking notions of gender. To understand the complex interaction between gender, technology and modernity, these terms must be properly defined and noted in their relation to feminist theories of agency.

26    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

Gender, Technology, Agency Like other social categories, gender is produced socially and historically, through social and institutional practices. Joan W. Scott provides a twofold definition of gender, which states the marked connection between gender and power, and the omnipresence of both: ‘[G]ender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power’ (1999: 42). These two propositions on gender are fundamentally and mutually connected; changes in the organisation of social relationships interact with changes in representations of power. Furthermore, Scott sees gender as operating at different levels, in layers of function and meaning, in these social relationships. Firstly, gender works in symbolic and representational ways, in assumptions about gender difference. Secondly, gender manifests itself in normative concepts and statements, usually expressed in religious, educational, scientific, legal and political doctrines. Thirdly, society makes use of gender in organisational and material ways, through social institutions and organisations. Finally, at the most personal level, gender is a subjective identity, a part of how one sees oneself and presents oneself to the world (199: 43–4). In short, gender operates in symbolic, normative and institutional ways, and also as a subjective identity. Importantly, considering gender as an unstable category, constructed through ongoing processes, makes change possible in gendered power structures. Through Scott’s definition of gender as working on various levels and as always being bound up with power, we see that gender and technology are linked on a variety of levels in terms of both function and meaning. Late nineteenth-­ century modernity not only involves technological changes, but also changes in gender formations and relations. As feminist scholars of technology have pointed out, defining technology can be a controversial issue. Because of a masculinist bias in science and technology studies, technology has too often been defined – as seen in everyday uses of the term – as ‘objects made out of metal’, or objects handled by men. This ‘hardware definition of technology’ (Wacjman 1991) has not only ignored histories of technologies not commonly associated with men, but has also excluded female inventors. Technology may be defined broadly, as by Melvin Kranzberg, as ‘“how things are commonly done or made [and] what things are done and made”’ (1959: 8–9). Kranzberg emphasises the need to ask other questions concerning technology: ‘Why are things done and made as they are? What effects have these methods and things upon other areas of human

The New Woman in Technological Modernity    27

activity? How have other elements in society and culture affected how, what, and why things are done or made?’ (9). This ‘co-­construction’ or ‘mutual shaping’ of technology and society is further described by Ron Westrum: ‘Technology and society intertwine: When one changes, the other is likely to change as well. Social changes bring new needs, desires, and insecurities: technical changes force new choices, new adjustments’ (1991: 4). Kranzberg’s broad and historical definition of technology as people’s ‘ways of making and doing things’ allows the term to encompass all kinds of technologies: Stone Age tools, cars, sewing, cooking and much more. If one is to consider a social context in the definition of technology, one must also regard gender as part of this equation; what is defined as technology is, like gender, a social construct. A more precise exploration of the term technology is provided by Westrum, who considers technology as consisting of ‘those material objects, techniques, and knowledge that allow human beings to transform and control the inanimate world’ (1991: 7). By this threefold definition technology is both concrete and abstract: ‘It is both the pair of scissors I hold in my hand and the knowledge of how to make them from iron, carbon, and chromium. It is both the resonating electrical grid and the system of knowledge that allowed electrical engineers to build it’ (Westrum 1991: 8). Westrum’s first designation of technology as material objects, ‘things’ or ‘devices’, helps encircle specific material technologies, while the designation of technology as techniques and knowledge frames the cultural and social work that technologies may carry out. Technology defined as objects marks out specific material technologies connected with the New Woman, such as the typewriter, the bicycle or medical technologies, while technology defined as techniques and knowledge is inferred in the skills required for typewriting or bicycling, or in the medical techniques and knowledge employed in nursing or doctoring. A further characteristic may be added to Westrum’s threefold definition of technology: that of volition or potentiality. Carl Mitcham explains volition as ‘the most individualized and subjective of the . . . manifestations of technology’, describing ways in which technologies may be associated with diverse types of ‘will, drive, motive, aspiration, intention, and choice’ (1994: 250, 247). In other words, technologies may provide space for usage outside of that envisaged by their inventor; what matters is not merely how one develops technologies, but what one does with them. This side to technology, its ambiguity or many possible outcomes, has been crucial to recent feminist theories of technology, which focus on the mutual shaping of gender and technology. Within feminist theory making, the notion of agency has become ‘a prerequisite around which other concepts are defined’ (Gardiner 1995:

28    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

9). Within feminist theory, agency can be defined as both an ‘­ individual’s capacity to act meaningfully in the world’ and as the ability to act in ‘unanticipated or innovative ways which may hinder, reinforce or catalyse social change’ (Parkins 2009: 12; McNay 2000: 5). Determinism in any context presents difficulties for theories of change, since determinism excludes the possibility of an acting subject. Following from this, an account of agency is needed to acknowledge the possibility of change within human–technology relations. As Rosalind Williams states in ‘The Political and Feminist Dimensions of Technological Determinism’, there is thus a fundamental ‘dissonance between technological determinism and a feminist understanding of history’ (1994: 232). Reading the New Woman as a figure of early feminism requires an account of individual or communal agency as part of that political or feminist history, a technology of self-­formation in relation to other technologies. While early feminist theories of technology focused on the question of whether particular technological changes had been a ‘boon or bane’ to women, that is to say whether they were inherently progressive or not, more recent feminist theories focus instead on gender relationships, regarding both men and women, analysing cultural practices and social systems to explore the ways in which gender and technology co-­ construct each other.6 It is now generally acknowledged within feminist scholarship on technology not only that ‘the social relations of technology are gendered relations’, and that ‘technology enters into gender identity’, but also that ‘technology itself cannot be fully understood without reference to gender’ (Cockburn 1992: 32). Patrick D. Hopkins notes the specific interaction between gender and technology: Existing sex roles and ideas of gender affects how technologies are used, which ones come to dominate in a particular context, and even what things are defined as technology. However, the technologies themselves often change sex roles and even notions of gender. They reorganize social systems; they permit us to step outside gendered social spheres whose boundaries are braced by technological limits on communication, labor, and mobility; they let us extend and alter ‘our place’ in the world. (1998: 14)

Gender relations influence technological change, which in turn configures gender relations. These relations are thus not structured according to a binary oppressive-­liberatory logic, but are diverse and mobile. As Judy Wajcman notes, ‘technology as such is neither inherently patriarchal nor unambiguously liberating’ (2010: 148). Rather, technology is to be considered as both a source and consequence of gender relations. Rather than determining whether a particular technology functions as a ‘boon or bane’ to women, current feminist theories of technology confirm that

The New Woman in Technological Modernity    29

there is no inherent emancipatory value in technologies themselves, but that this depends on how specific technologies are employed or taken up in a social context. The focus on user agency in relation to other agencies is thus especially important in feminist historiography. Despite this fact, technological determinism, that is, the idea that any specific technology bears inherent values or outcomes, is still present in readings of histories of gender and technology. As is seen in the following chapters, technologies such as the typewriter or the bicycle are still often seen as in themselves having ‘liberated’ women. It is therefore worth spending some time unravelling what the concept of technological determinism means, and suggesting an alternative framework for how to situate technologies. Martin Heidegger’s essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954) is one of the key texts of technological determinism, and has formed the basis of much later criticism. In order to uncover the ‘truth’ or ‘essence’ of technology, that is to say to define technology, Heidegger here uses the example of a silversmith who by his work (in the mechanical process) does not really produce a silver chalice, but instead he brings it forth from the material he works with (1978: 295). Technology, as it were, ‘sets-­upon’ or orders nature. The essence of technology is thus, according to Heidegger, the way in which technology forces human beings to treat nature and others as resources. Technological determinism, however, fails to acknowledge that not only does technology change what it means to be human, but users also change meanings of technology: technology and society co-­construct or mutually shape each other. Andrew Feenberg, building on Foucault’s writings on technology, counters Heidegger’s determinism by the concept of potentiality (1999: 99) to emphasise the part that other human or non-­human actors play in the relation between technology and society. Technological objects are neither neutral tools nor (as determinist theories suggest) do they constitute a new kind of cultural system that controls the social world. Technology is neither neutral nor autonomous, but ambivalent; it harbours potentialities for different meanings and implications – like a literary text. Technological determinism furthermore fails to note that there are many diverse and specific technologies, rather than one abstract all-­ encompassing technology. As Thomas J. Misa writes, merely abstract approaches cannot help us discern ‘the varieties of technologies we face and the ambiguities in the technologies’ (9). Different groups and cultures have appropriated the same technology and used it differently. Foucault’s conception of technology as part of power relations, within a historiospecific context, provides a clear critique of essentialist and determinist formulations of technology. Unlike Heidegger’s critique

30    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

of modernity, Foucault’s critique is particularistic. As Jana Sawicki points out, rather than attempting to provide a general account of the ‘essence’ of modern technology, Foucault provides ‘specific histories of technological practices’; he identifies ‘particular practices in the present, the assumed value of which he is skeptical, and traces their lines of descent . . . to denaturalize them’ (1987: 168). The term ‘technology’ in Foucault’s usage is marked by an ambivalence, fluctuating between two main ways of using the term: in his middle writings on power and discipline, Foucault describes the ‘technologies of power’ or of domination, how subjects are governed, while in his later writings he encircles the technologies of self-­formation, that is, the practices whereby individuals make themselves and are made into selves. These ‘technologies of the self’ permit individuals ‘to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being’ (2000: 225). These two ways of characterising technology, as technologies of domination which are also part of power relations, and as a way of governing the self, provide ways to account for the agency of the New Woman figure in her relation with technology, thus encircling a concept of agency in gender-­technology relations. Foucault defines technologies as neither agents in themselves nor tools for human aims, but as part of mobile and reciprocal power relations. This conception of power as dispersed constellations of mobile relations permits a concept of agency while also offering an understanding of technologies as volatile or as harbouring various potential outcomes. Power, in Foucault’s terms, is not something that can be ‘held’ by a person or institution or ‘withheld’ from another: ‘one should not assume a massive and primal condition of domination, a binary structure with “dominators” on one side and “dominated” on the other, but rather a multiform production of relations of domination’ (1980b: 142). There is ‘no binary and all-­encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled’ (1998: 94), but power relations are everywhere and come from everywhere; one is never ‘outside’ of power. Instead, power relations ‘are rooted deep in the social nexus, not a supplementary structure over and above “society” whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of’ (2002: 343). Importantly, the omnipresence of power relations does not entail that one is condemned to always reinforce them. Power structures are of a relational character, their existence depending on ‘a multiplicity of points of resistance’ which are present everywhere in the power network and which ‘play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations’ (1998: 95). Power relations are mobile, and therefore changeable; they are to be seen as constant struggles rather

The New Woman in Technological Modernity    31

than as fixed structures. In a Foucauldian framework, technologies cannot be studied apart from the society in which they work; technologies are part of power relations, not instruments for them. And as such, they are also changeable; as power relations change, so also potential meanings of technologies change. Foucault has been criticised by feminist theorists for his ‘gender blindness’; as Lois McNay states in Foucault and Feminism, the subject or ‘disciplined body’ of Foucault’s writings is ‘often implicitly assumed to be male’ (1992: 33–4). However, even more problematic than Foucault’s gender blindness are the readings of his work that deny any account or possibility of individual agency (1992: 12). Foucault’s characterisation of the historical constitution of the subject and the body through a network of power and knowledge has been crucial within feminist scholarship, providing a way to theorise the body while avoiding essentialist formulations. While the body is always at the centre of power relations, it is not a mere passive object. Foucault indeed writes in Discipline and Punish that the body is ‘directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it’, and describes the ways in which they ‘invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’ (1991: 25). But then, this hold upon the body is to be conceived ‘not as a property, but as a strategy’: ‘one should decipher in it a network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess’ (1991: 26). Power relations are constantly moving, changing, resisting, and the body is an agent within these formations. Indeed, the Foucauldian body can be seen as ‘a site of the production of positive forces and creative differences’, and if inscribed by history, it is inscribed in ways that are ‘open to reinterpretations and multiple meanings’ (Oksala 2005: 127, 134). As Johanna Oksala indicates, it is in the body that ‘the seeds for subverting the normalizing aims of power are sown’ (2011: 93). The relation between body and machine, subject and technology, is not to be seen as a one-­way influence, but as an interaction. The body is always present as an integral part of power relations, a prerequisite for any notion of political struggle or change and thus for any feminist reading of history. Technologies in themselves have no power to change social structures, but any potential for change lies in the interaction between technology and society, individual and structure. As Nina Lerman et al. note, ‘the mutual shaping of technology and culture takes place through people – through a range of human relationships’ (1997: 5). Technologies in themselves do not provide social change, but their impact depends on how they are employed. A tool can be used in a variety of ways, and it might be futile to attempt an evaluation of the revolutionary character

32    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

of a certain technology in itself. Indeed, the relationship between gender and technology is not one-­sided but mutual: ‘any impact that seems to arise from a technology (or even directly from an artefact), in fact arises from the interplay between technology and the social context’ (Everts 1998: 6). As Williams notes in an earlier quote, there is a fundamental ‘dissonance between technological determinism and a feminist understanding of history’ (1994: 232). The possibility for change lies in the meeting point between technology and agency, in the interrelation between technology and gender. This chapter has argued, via Foucault’s notion of both language and technology as part of power relations, that neither language nor technologies are mere ‘tools’ for ‘rulers’. Technologies do not have inherently emancipatory values; rather, they harbour different outcomes. A literary text is neither oppressive nor liberatory per se (as gynocritical theory assumes), in the same way as a technology is neither oppressive nor liberatory in isolation (as technological determinism assumes). Instead, they are meaning-­machines that gain import first in relation to their surroundings – be it readers of a text or users of a specific technology. Foucault’s ideas can thus be employed to counter essentialist and determinist assumptions regarding literature and technology, through considering the omnipresence of mobile power relations, and the role of technologies of self-­formation therein. Through feminist theories of technology, the rest of the book examines the crucial link between gender and technology as manifested through the technologies associated with the New Woman, and especially the role of literature in shaping and being shaped by gendered uses of these technologies. It is not just through female users of technologies such as the typewriter and the bicycle, but also in relation with this other technology – literature – that these technologies are given much of their social and political significance. Literary texts partake in debates regarding gendered uses of technology in the late nineteenth century, in this way coming to work as social and cultural agents. Connecting changes in technology and in ideas of gender and social order, the following chapters study the interrelation between gender and modern technologies as crucial to first-­wave feminism and to the concept of the New Woman.

Notes 1. The term ‘fin de siècle’ appears to have entered cultural discourse in 1888, as the title of a play by F. de Jouvenot and H. Micard which was performed

The New Woman in Technological Modernity    33 in Paris that year. By 1893 the term was so well established that one of the characters in George Egerton’s story ‘The Spell of the White Elf’ uses it as a shorthand to denote ‘a set of values and a lifestyle that together virtually constitute a cultural formation’ (Pykett 1996: 1). 2. With the increased scholarly interest in and reconsideration of the fin de siècle followed a reconsideration of New Woman literature. As Teresa Mangum notes, until the 1980s New Woman novels were usually dismissed as ‘popular’ rather than ‘literary’, as political rather than artful, or as topical (that is to say concerning women) rather than universal (1998: 5). 3. Keating (1989) highlights specific significant events in fin de siècle literary modernity; the commercialisation of literature: the royalty system (15), the organisation of authors and publishers in trade unions and societies (27), the death of the three-­volume novel (32), the increase in periodicals and magazines (35–6), the emergence of organised literary agents (71), the figure of the Grub Street author (79). 4. For a further discussion of the genealogy of the term, see Ardis 1990: 10–28; Jordan 1983: 19; Rubenstein 1986: 16–23; Tusan 1998. 5. Gynocriticism considers the specificity of women’s writing as part of a specifically female reality: ‘the programme of gynocritics is to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt male models and theories’ (Showalter 1979: 28). 6. Feminist scholarship on technology, often subsumed by feminist science studies, has increased significantly since the 1980s, and has turned towards studying the constructed and interrelated character of both gender and technology. See Wajcman (2010) for an overview of approaches of feminist theories of technology; from the early discussions of the definition of gender, through 1980s explorations of the ‘gendered character of technology itself’, to the contemporary fusion of cyborg feminism and the co-­constructivist or mutual shaping approach (2010: 146).

Chapter 2

Typewriters and Typists: Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle

Although various types of writing machines had been invented in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the earlier models being intended for the use of blind persons, the extensive use of the typewriter machine in Britain dates only from the 1880s. Only when the Remington Company started manufacturing typewriters on a large scale in 1873 (after Christopher Latham Sholes’s model) was the typewriter more widely adopted. Many changes were made to the machine – for example, in terms of keyboard layout, visibility and type bar mechanism – and different manufacturers had different models, but from the 1880s onward the typewriter had a firm place both in office and popular culture (Derry and Willams 1960: 642).1 Writing in 1897, C. L. Stevens claimed that there were then nearly one hundred different types of machines on the market, and out of these a finished Remington typewriter ‘is being produced for every five minutes of the working day’ (1897: 650–1). Importantly, the typewriter proved one of the most significant means for women to enter the office space – that previously male-­coded domain – at the Victorian fin de siècle. In fact, Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell state that ‘[t]urn-­of-­the-­century feminists associated standing up for one’s rights with sitting down at one’s desk; the history of the typewriter (human operator and machine) is bound to a history of the contestation and re-­installation of gender roles’ (2005: 4). Gender and technology are joined together in the female typist, and as the typewriter came into widespread use in the late nineteenth century, the New Woman typist became a recurrent literary motif. Because of its role in opening up possibilities for female employment, thus contesting late nineteenth-­century notions of gender, the typewriter has been read as a technology of emancipation. Indeed, media historian Friedrich Kittler claims that ‘[a]part from Freud, it was Remington who “granted the female sex access to the office”’ (1992: 352), placing the act of changing gender roles in the machine itself. However, as Rosalind

Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle    35

Williams asserts, there is a fundamental ‘dissonance between technological determinism and a feminist understanding of history’ (1994: 232); technologies cannot be seen as revolutionary in themselves. Reading the New Woman as a figure of early feminism requires an account of agency, in order to acknowledge the possibility of political change. In examining the relation between typist and typewriter, body and machine, questions about agency and structure are opened up and put into play. This chapter explores the crucial link between gender and technology at the Victorian fin de siècle through the figure of the New Woman typist, as constructed in novels and short stories published at the turn of the century, focusing specifically on Grant Allen’s The Type-­Writer Girl (1897) and Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys (1903) (Figures 2.1 and 2.2). Trade journals and other periodical press of the time place these literary works in a historical and social context, to more fully understand their role in the debates concerning the emancipated female typist.

The New Woman Typist Fin de siècle modernity in Britain involved not only a rapid increase in the number of clerks and white-­collar workers, but also ‘the supplanting of the Dickensian counting house by the modern business office’ (Wild 2006: 3). The average size of offices increased, scientific management and office mechanisation developed, and industrial concentration and amalgamation amplified – all in all, leading to a concentration and rationalisation of office work and staffs (Holcombe 1973: 142–4; Heller 2011: 111–15). As office structure changed throughout the nineteenth century, so also the gendering of clerical work changed. The Dickensian black-­ coated clerk was replaced through what Gregory Anderson (1988) has termed ‘the white-­blouse revolution’; the entry into the office by female workers. These female clerical workers, typists as well as stenographers, were demarcated from the still usually male secretaries, often spatially segregated in the office space, and paid less than their male colleagues (Heller 2011: 123–4; Jordan 1996: 77–8). Accounts of the number of women employed as typists and as clerical workers vary: T. K. Derry and Trevor I. Williams state that in 1881 there were only 7,000 women clerks in England and Wales, while thirty years later there were 146,000 (1960: 642); Meta Zimmeck in her more recent article states that from 1851 to 1911 the number of female clerical workers ‘rocketed from a mere 2,000 to 166,000 (x83); or from 2 per cent to 20 per cent of the total’ (1986: 154). These numbers clearly indicate the immense changes in the gendering of clerical work.

36    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

The emergence of the female typist is noted in women’s and trade journals of the time. An 1891 article signed ‘C. L.’ in The Ladies Treasure: A Household Magazine confirms the new gendering of office work, while connecting the female typist with modernity: ‘The lady typewriter is an entirely modern creation; even ten years ago she was rarely to be met with, but now the chief workers of the type-­writing machines appear to be of the female sex’ (1891: 164). In June 1891 the London-­based journal The London Phonographer: A Journal Devoted to Typewriting and Shorthand (ed. John Bassett) was launched, a publication exclusively devoted to typewriting and shorthand (stenography), the latter being a key skill for typists. As a monthly journal, it contained editorials, shorthand notes and transcriptions, reviews of and advertisements for office equipment, short works of fiction (often on themes linked to typewriting and office culture), letters, reports from typewriting offices abroad and articles on issues ranging from what to wear in the office to typewriting speed contests. Many of the authors and contributors were typists or stenographers themselves, something which, together with the many letters to the journal, made The London Phonographer a possible platform for discussion among the office workers. The journal most probably circulated in typewriting offices and at the lodging houses available to female office workers.2 In its first issue the crucial link between female emancipation and the typewriter is made clear. The front page is covered by an article on the typewriting society in London, and it starts out declaring that in a new journal issued in the interests of the typewriting world, ‘the pioneer who opened out this industry nine years ago should hold first place’ (1).3 The pioneer is Madame Monchablon, the woman who in 1882 established the first typewriting office in London at 26 Austin Friars. This office was soon followed by others, such as ‘The Ladies’ Typewriting Office’ situated in Chancery Lane, opened by Marian Marshall, a former pupil of Monchablon and the author of the article. Before long, Marshall notes in The London Phonographer, ‘[m]ore machines were bought, more ladies taught, and the clicking of the typewriter echoed along the corridors from early morning till late at night’ (3), with the office receiving a steady increase in work. The typewriter and the New Woman are joined together more generally as signs of newness, progress and modernity. As Lawrence Rainey points out, the female secretary ‘was shorthand for a recognizably modern phenomenon; she indexed a distinctly new occupational category that sprang into existence only after 1880 (in America) or 1885 (in Britain) and was indelibly linked with metropolitan experience. . . . She was the most visible, everyday representative of the modern woman’ (2009: 273). Indeed, Gillian Sutherland suggests that female white-­collar

Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle    37

workers such as office workers, through their ‘mass presence’ and independence, became ‘earlier and more substantial harbingers of change’ than Girton girls or non-­working New Women (2015: 161). The link between female office workers and modernity is manifest in the first issue of The London Phonographer, which names these numerous practitioners of typewriting and shorthand as ‘pioneers of progress in this very progressive country’ (14). In fact, shorthand writers and typists are said to be ‘imbued with the progressive spirit of our time’, which makes them ‘remarkable as examples of modern ingenuity and enterprise’ (13). With the typewriter machine itself ‘metaphorically encapsulating the experience of the modern’ (Shiach 2004: 115), the newness of the female typist here becomes a marker of a specifically British modernity. The rise in the number of female office workers is formulated in fiction of the time as well as in the periodical press. An immense amount of typist or secretarial fiction was published at the end of the nineteenth century, although not all of it shared the stereotypical traits and politics of the New Woman. In addition to the many ‘typewriter girl’ novels and short stories circulating, there were many New Woman characters who worked as typists, also before the term New Woman appeared around 1894; for example, Helen Channing in L. T. Meade’s novel Engaged to be Married: A Tale of Today (1890), Mina Harker (perhaps the most famous literary typist and stenographer of the fin de siècle) in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Rachel West in Mary Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage (1899). Mary Sutherland in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story ‘A Case of Identity’ (1891, set in 1887 or 1888) could also be considered a New Woman typist. Since her inheritance goes straight to her father-­in-­law, Mary earns her own income by typewriting: ‘“It brings me twopence a sheet, and I can often do from fifteen to twenty sheets a day”’ (1891b: 249). When the same over-­protective father-­in-­ law forbids Mary to attend balls and see friends, typewriting becomes the sole means through which she can momentarily leave the restricted domestic setting. The typist of Robert Barr’s short story ‘The Typewriter Girl’ (1900) similarly sees typewriting as a way to escape the patriarchal home. Facing an unwanted marriage, the heroine – who has ‘an objection to being coerced’ (1900: 169) – flees home and starts working at a law firm. Typewriting can also provide a way of stepping outside of prescribed gender roles in courtship: Leslie Rose, the main character of Ménie Muriel Dowie’s Love and his Mask (1901), learns to type to pursue her love interest anonymously, using the machine as ‘her agent, her âme damnée’ (1901: 2). Marriage and typewriting also intersect in Mrs Baillie Reynolds’s (pen name for Gertrude M. Robins) novel Phoebe in Fetters (1904), in which the Ibsen-­reading typist Phoebe enters into a

38    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

modern marital arrangement similar to one described in Sarah Grand’s notorious New Woman novel The Heavenly Twins (1893). Going a step further, in J. M. Barrie’s play The Twelve-­Pound Look (1911) a wife leaves her husband to become a typist, after she has earned enough to buy her own typewriter – which at the time cost twelve pounds (hence the play’s title): ‘I got some work through a friend, and with my first twelve pounds I paid for my machine. Then I considered that I was free to go, and I went’ (1930: 732). The play ends with his new wife asking the husband: ‘Are they very expensive? . . . Those machines?’ (736), displaying the allure of female emancipation by means of typewriting.4 The typewriter in these works provides both a means of earning one’s own livelihood, and a means of leaving an unsatisfying domestic life. One of the most well-­known New Woman novels is centred on a female-­run typewriting agency. George Gissing’s 1893 novel The Odd Women presents several self-­supporting female characters; most memorable is the independent typist Rhoda Nunn, who has ‘made up her mind to live alone and work steadily for a definite object’ (1893: vol. 1, 102). Rhoda is a typical New Woman figure: she is well educated, independent, politically active and critical of marriage; she is ‘a woman daring enough to think and act for herself’ (vol. 1, 66). Although the term New Woman was first popularised through Sarah Grand’s 1894 essay, it is used in plural form in The Odd Women, as Everard Barfoot remarks on Rhoda: ‘A strong character, of course. More decidedly one of the new women than you yourself – isn’t she?’ (vol. 1, 235). Gissing recalls the common positing of the New Woman as a new or ‘unknown’ sex, when describing Rhoda, this self-­supporting odd woman, as possessing ‘a suggestiveness directed not solely to the intellect, of something like an unfamiliar sexual type’ (vol. 1, 55). On first view her countenance ‘seemed masculine, its expression somewhat aggressive – eyes shrewdly observant and lips consciously impregnable’ (vol. 1, 55). As a New Woman, she is almost seen as a sex of her own. Together with her friend and colleague Mary Barfoot, Rhoda runs a business school educating young women into professions – and toward emancipation. While Rhoda teaches the students typewriting and other clerical work, her typewriting classes are bound up with the greater mission of female emancipation. Everard asks Rhoda, after she declines to marry him by saying that she will never abandon her work: ‘“What is your work? Copying with a type-­machine, and teaching others to do the same – isn’t that it?”’ Rhoda replies: ‘“The work by which I earn money, yes. But if it were no more than that” –’ (vol. 2, 219). Her work is rather what Rhoda calls ‘“the greatest movement of our time – that of emancipating her sex”’ (vol. 1, 245). Their business school is not

Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle    39

only an institution to further women’s careers, but also a meeting point for women’s rights activists. At the school, Mary and Rhoda have ‘a bookcase full of work on the Woman-­question and allied topics’ (vol. 1, 152) serving as a circulating library, and once a month one of them gives a lecture on such a subject. The work of typewriting and the work of women’s emancipation become intertwined. It is not merely the typewriter machine itself that threatens to ‘unsex’ the New Woman, but her entry into the office space. Rhoda, when criticised for educating women into a career that her opponents call ‘unwomanly’, states that she is glad to lead women into the previously male sphere of the office. She describes in militarist language the league of typists as ‘“an armed movement, an invasion by women of the spheres which men have always forbidden us to enter”’ (vol. 2, 85). Rhoda disclaims other kinds of work – an ‘excellent governess, a perfect hospital nurse’ – as even harmful to women’s emancipation. This is because nursing still imitates a stereotypical womanliness whereas female typists, working in the previously male domain of the office, will become ‘“rational and responsible human beings”’ (vol. 2, 84). Instead, Rhoda states: ‘It must be something new, something free from the reproach of womanliness. I don’t care whether we crowd the men out or not. I don’t care what results, if only women are made strong and self-­reliant and nobly independent! . . . Most likely we shall have a revolution in the social order greater than any that yet seems possible. . . . There must be a new type of woman, active in every sphere of life: a new worker out in the world, a new ruler of the home.’ (vol. 2, 87–8)

Certain critics of the late nineteenth-­ century women’s movements argued that it was ‘unwomanly’ and ‘against nature’ for women to be working outside the home. The signature ‘C. L.’ in an 1891 issue of The Ladies Treasure gives the example of a ‘well-­known modern novelist’ who claims that ‘all outdoor work is “naturally distasteful” to women, who were designed by nature to “sit at home and nurse the baby, and look after the servants”’ (1891: 164). Rhoda in The Odd Women declares that women’s rights campaigners – typists among them – ‘must carry on an active warfare, must be invaders’ into the previously male spheres, and Mary in fact gives one of her monthly talks on the subject ‘Woman as an invader’ (vol. 2, 88, 81). The typewriter, as the main technology responsible for this new gendering of clerical work, can be seen as an emblem of this ‘invasion’ into the office space – it becomes a visual sign of female emancipation. As the typewriter becomes ‘a figure of women’s labour and their increased participation in the public sphere’, the machine is read as ‘a tool of social emancipation’ (Shiach

40    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2004: 63). Because of its status as a visual emblem, we find literary New Woman typists most often in commercial or Grub Street writing, where the machine is employed as a shorthand for emancipatory politics. There is a real significance in the female typists’ entry into a realm long since kept only for men. As noted in the Introduction, part of the emancipatory potential of new technologies of the late nineteenth century was that they allowed an entry into previously male-­gendered spheres: ‘the emancipation of women is presented as inseparably linked to their movement into the workplace and the public sphere’ (Felski 1994: 151). Spatial structure and social structure are mutually constitutive. Working women’s socially lived identities were thus ‘partly defined by the spaces they occupied – and . . . in turn their presence produced the social spaces and buildings which they occupied’ (Walker 1998: 66). Indeed, Price and Thurschwell note that early twentieth-­century conservatives worried that working side by side with men in public would ‘unsex’ women (2005: 5). Not only might the supposedly innocent female minds be polluted by knowledge, but the possible sexual contact with male office workers was perceived as a threat (Thurschwell 2001b: 158). Even as typists often worked in separate rooms from the male clerks, the bodily presence of women in the previously male-­dominated offices threatened established gender norms. The female typist thus engages in a kind of double writing; she is not merely tapping away on her machine, but is also rewriting discourses of gender by inscribing her physical presence in the office. By working as typists, women were introduced to new possible ways of living. The typewriter and the emancipatory ideas signifying the New Woman are thus frequently connected in the New Woman typist figure. However, the figure of the typewriter girl is not always conflated with the New Woman to suggest the revolutionary potential of the typewriter. In an 1898 article in the journal The Woman’s Signal, J. R. Greenhalgh imagines the New Woman as a typist: At the present time, when so much is being written and said about the ‘new woman,’ it may be interesting to consider one of the modern channels into which her superfluous energies have been profitably directed. The almost universal adoption of the typewriter for the rapid execution of correspondence and all written matter has created a great and increasing demand for well-­ educated girls, who are peculiarly adapted for this class of work. (1898: 371)

The typewriter is described in this instance as a way of channelling the ‘superfluous energies’ of the New Woman. The use of these words, ‘superfluous energies’ being ‘directed’, suggests rather the containment of the threat represented by the New Woman within the safe confines

Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle    41

of the female typist, rather than the typewriter being a tool of female emancipation. Could the figure of the female typist, in the views of the conservative forces of the time, serve as a possible containment of the New Woman, a useful way of controlling her energies and activities? However, this view suggests the female typist – both in literary accounts and in offices – as occupying a passive role in the processes of signification, a reading that ignores the volatile character of technology as well as any agency on the part of the typewriter operator. The figure of the New Woman typist not only infers an appropriation of the typewriter as a tool of emancipation, but through literature also engages in a struggle of naming and defining the typist profession.

Typewriters, Typists and Secretarial Agency The relation between the typewriter operator and her machine opens up questions regarding the relation between gender, technology and agency. As laid out in Chapter 1, a Foucauldian framework which situates technology as part of power relations, as both disciplining the body and articulating the body as agent, provides a helpful formulation of the relation between operator and machine. Despite the notion of agency acknowledged in Foucault’s theories on power and technologies, through the formulation of power relations as mobile and reciprocal, some critics read his formulation of power as signifying an all-­encompassing force of domination, with technologies as tools for this same force. We see this argument in the writings of Friedrich Kittler, who dedicates one part of his book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986) to the innovation and role of the typewriter in social history. In his earlier Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (1985) Kittler employs Foucault’s discourse analysis to formulate shifts in discourse between two turns of the centuries, and the role of technological media in these shifts. Foucault describes the regulating force of discourse in subject-­formation, but emphasises that there is no totalising homogenous discourse: Nothing would be more false than to see in the analysis of discursive formations an attempt at totalitarian periodization, whereby from a certain moment and for a certain time, everyone would think in the same way, in spite of surface differences, say the same thing, through a polymorphous vocabulary, and produce a sort of great discourse that one could travel over in any direction. (1989: 165)

Kittler denies a subjectivity not constructed by new technologies: ‘What remains of people is what media can store and communicate. . . . [T]he

42    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

phantasm of man as the creator of media vanishes’ (1999: xl–xli). Kittler thus avoids considering any potential agency on account of human subjects. Autonomy or agency can only, according to Kittler, originate in the technologies themselves: technological media ‘determine our situation’ (1999: xxix). Confronted with Kittler’s conception of ‘so-­called Man’ as a mere extension of technologies it becomes difficult to account for political struggle or change, specifically as embodied in New Woman writing at the end of the nineteenth century. By situating agency only in technologies themselves, Kittler’s philosophy silences individuals and movements. The consequence of this kind of reading, in studies of technology, is that the relation between technology and the subject becomes one-­directional or determinist; technologies are seen as inscribing passive subjects. Quoting a 1923 book on the typewriter, Kittler argues that it was the invention of this machine that ‘“granted the female sex access into the office”’ (1992: 352), thus placing the possibility for change in the technology itself. Considering the figure of the female typist as determined by technologies, Kittler argues that as women became information workers – such as typists – these new information worker jobs were soon devalued and coded female, and women became associated or even equated with machines. Women as secretaries became central relay stations for vast networks of usually male-­manipulated information (1992: 347). Kittler thus studies the effect of the typewriter on the female typist, not the influence that the female typist may have on her machine, or her agency in relation to it; the subject and the body are inscribed upon by an external force. Within a Foucauldian framework on the other hand, change involves an interaction between technologies and society, machines and subjects. Foucault’s notion of technologies as part of mobile power relations opens up for more complex readings which take various forms of agency into account. As power relations change, so do meanings and implications of specific technologies. Lois McNay states that ‘within the oppressive constraints that operate around ideas of femininity, there are contradictions and instabilities which, at times, have provided women with a base from which to undermine the very system which constricts them’ (1992: 42). Within a Foucauldian framework of technology, individual agency can be located without submitting either to technological determinism or to simplistic accounts of individualism. In the case of the typewriter and the female typist, while the machine itself remains a material object within power relations, the New Woman typist can be seen as actively appropriating or incorporating the typewriter as a means of self-­formation. Debates concerning the naming of the female typist underscore the

Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle    43

ways in which material technologies and other agencies connect the typewriter operator and her machine, as formulated in New Woman writing. The New Woman was often depicted in popular culture of the time as either an unsexed, mannish creature, or a hyperfeminine ‘erotomaniac’, or indeed as an entirely ‘new gender’ (Grundy 1894: 300). Authors often envisaged her as possessing a dual nature. Lyn Pykett describes how the New Woman thus challenged traditional gender boundaries in paradoxical ways: The mannish New Woman threatened such boundaries from one direction by quitting the sphere of the proper feminine, aping masculinity and becoming a new intermediate sex. On the other hand, these boundaries were also eroded by the New Woman’s hyperfemininity. The New Woman as hysteric ­threatened to invade and infect the whole of society with a degenerative femininity. (1992: 141)

This sexual duality or ambiguity of the New Woman is mirrored in the ambiguous relation between the typewriter operator and her machine. At the end of the nineteenth century the term ‘typewriter’ had a double meaning: up until around 1910 it indicated both the machine for typewriting and the person who operated it (Olwell 2005: 50). This is illustrated in the 1891 article ‘Is Type-­Writing a Successful Occupation for Educated Women?’ in The Englishwoman’s Review, where the signature ‘R. V. Gill’ complains of the lack of a proper title for the typewriter/copyist: ‘By-­the-­way, it would be well if some fertile brain could create a suitable title for these “copyists.” They are frequently called “type-­writers,” which is clearly a misnomer, as the machine is the “type-­writer.” Then, again, the name “typist” is often used, but this is a most objectionable title’ (1891: 83). Only gradually was the term changed from a free-­standing noun (‘a lady typewriter’) to an adjective (‘a typewriter girl’) and in the end separated from human operation by the term ‘typist’ (Price and Thurschwell 2005: 4). There is much debate in periodicals of the time concerning this semantic ambiguity. Whereas on the one hand the double subject of the typewriter is made a source of comedy and satire, many trade journals and women’s journals call for a distinction between the operator and the machine. An 1892 issue of The London Phonographer presents an example of the typewriter ambiguity as a source of comedy: the short piece ‘She was Angry’, signed by ‘Judge’. The joke here is a wife’s anger at her husband as he comes home having bought a ribbon for his typewriter. While the wife thinks that he has bought an accessory for his female typist, the husband cannot understand the fuss over him buying a new ink ribbon to put in his typewriter machine (255). There are

44    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

numerous satirical postcards and other illustrations suggesting the same confusion between operator and machine (see Keep 1997; Mullin 2016). The ambiguity of the term typewriter, and the proper naming of the typist’s occupation, is debated already in the first issue of The London Phonographer in 1891. An unsigned piece under the heading ‘Typewriter Tappings’ asks: ‘When will the English public see the absurdity of calling typists typewriters? The typewriter is the machine, not the person operating it, any more than a telegraphist is a telegraph, or a pianist a piano! . . . A “Lady typewriter wanted” suggests the question of sex in the machines! Don’t you see?’ (16). On the same page there is another text regarding the same question, under the heading ‘Typist or Typewriter’. Here the author mocks a piece in a ‘Ladies’ paper which has stated that “the skilful lady typewriter” is not likely to lack employment’. The author remarks: ‘For the benefit of those who are still ignorant of the meaning of the word typewriter, & c., we give the following explanations, which were settled long ago: The machine is a typewriter; an operator is a typist; when working the typewriter she is typing’ (16). There seems to be a consensus (‘explanations, which were settled long ago’) among the typists themselves. This ambiguity is moreover seen in debates of the time regarding the nature of typewriting; the relation between the operator and her machine at work. Does typewriting allow for or even require any intellectual capacity or agency on the typist’s part, or is it a mere mechanical occupation? Just as in trade or professional journals typists themselves call for a proper naming of their occupation – ‘typist’ instead of ‘typewriter’ – there is also a call for recognition of the capability, ‘brains’ and individual agency of the typist. An example of this can be seen among the ‘Typewriter Tappings’ in an 1892 issue of The London Phonographer, where the author ‘Tip Taps’ criticises the Standard periodical for a statement where a typist is referred to as a ‘“purely mechanical typewriter”’. The author here corrects the Standard, stating that: ‘A typewriter is a machine, but it does not follow that the work performed upon it is “purely mechanical,” nor that the performer is either a mechanic or a machine, as one might imagine from the misapplication of the word typewriter’ (276). Unless guided by ‘a well-­educated, intelligent brain’, the typewriter machine would not turn out anything intelligible. The author concludes: ‘Therefore I decline, on my own account and that of my fellow-­typists, to have my occupation, calling, or whatever the Standard may be pleased to dub my work, termed “purely mechanical”’ (276). The instructions of a 1900 typing manual echo this sentiment, stating that

Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle    45 The Typist’s fingers must be made to be the ready, speedy, and reliable servants of the brain. . . . The brain itself must, by regular training and concentrated thought on the part of the typist, be so trained as to direct the fingers and utilize the knowledge of the combinations [of language] alluded to; thus removing all hesitation in typing, so far as it is possible commensurate with the ability brought to bear upon the work. (Dalziel and Lumley 1900: 4–5)

In addition, ‘C. L.’ in an 1891 issue of The Ladies Treasure states that business employers usually expect their ‘lady type-­writer to be more than a mere copyist’: ‘the educated and quick-­witted woman who can manipulate her machine “with brains,” as the famous artist mixed his colours, is too scarce a being not to command a comfortable position and good salary’ (1891: 165). Typewriting is thus, as expressed by these typists, not to be considered as merely mechanical copying. Indeed, the typist, it seems, must have some higher education, and knowledge of several languages is preferred. Marion Leslie explains in her 1890s article on typewriting as an employment for women, in The Woman at Home, that ‘typewriting is not merely a mechanical action. . . . [T]he woman who essays to become a really successful typist must be one of good education and general culture. She must bring not simply a delicate touch to the instrument, but brains to the work’ (c. 1890s: 579–80). For this purpose, The London Phonographer in each issue presents lists of useful business terms in French, German, Greek, Latin and more. Leslie further explains that typewriting is ‘an employment which appeals to the educated class of woman – the woman who has an acquaintance with literature, and a sufficient knowledge of history and geography’ (580). This description certainly strikes up an image of the independent and well-­educated New Woman, graduate of Girton College. The aforementioned Rhoda Nunn, emancipated New Woman typist of The Odd Women, teaches her students not only typewriting but ‘other kinds of work that demanded intelligence’ (vol. 1, 152) to prepare them for office work. What is at stake in the semantic ambiguity of the word ‘typewriter’ is more than a mere naming issue. While the New Woman is often formulated in texts of the time as both simultaneously unsexed and hyperfeminine, through her typewriter work the figure is suggested as simultaneously machine and woman. The typist naming debate, with its discussion of the nature of typewriting work, draws attention to the instability of discourses; the ways in which discourses may change through time and the differing voices they may contain. Recalling Joan W. Scott’s notion of gender (1999: 43–4) as operating on different overlapping levels – symbolic, normative, institutional and subjective – we see that while at an individual level many typists themselves define and defend their occupation, calling for a proper naming of their profession,

46    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

this may be incongruous with discourses at other levels, such as those controlled by office managers or satirists. Subjective or individual elements of gender may well overlap but not be the same as institutional or representational elements. Reading two popular New Woman typist novels of the fin de siècle will underline the role that literary texts play in this naming debate, and in articulating a specific secretarial agency. Typewriter (female): The Type-­Writer Girl (1897) Grant Allen’s 1897 novel The Type-­ Writer Girl may be read as a contribution to the contemporary debate regarding the female typist’s character and profession, and to the questions of technology and agency implicated therein. Allen (1848–99) is an example of the late nineteenth-­ century ‘man of letters’, writing scientific essays as well as fiction in response to the growing diversification of literary demand and consumption in the late nineteenth century (Greenslade and Rodgers 2005: 7; Morton 2005). Edward Clodd in his memoir on Allen comments on the writer’s many-­sided career: ‘naturalist, anthropologist, physicist, historian, poet, novelist, essayist, critic – what place is to be assigned to this versatile, well-­equipped worker?’ (1900: 207–8). Allen can thus be seen as a ‘sign of the times’ (Greenslade and Rodgers 2005: 17), his work emblematic of late nineteenth-­century literary modernity. Allen’s writing is not only diverse in genre, but also consists of an engagement with contemporary issues. He took part in various debates of his time, publishing essays on the ‘Woman Question’ as well as several works of New Woman fiction. His most famous New Woman text is the novel The Woman Who Did (1895), which was published in John Lane’s Keynote series, a ‘haven for “New Woman” fiction, naturalistic short stories, and “decadent” poetry and art’ (Stetz 1991: 72). The main character in The Woman Who Did is Herminia Barton, a former Girton Girl who earns her own living by teaching, journalism and editorial work: ‘I wouldn’t be dependent on any man, not even my own father’ (1895: 15). Like New Woman writers such as Mona Caird, Herminia sees marriage as ‘part and parcel of a system of slavery’ (43), believing instead in a free union between the sexes. When Herminia sees her daughter, who was born out wedlock, shunning her mother’s emancipatory work, Herminia commits suicide as a martyr for the cause of women. The novel soon became ‘the most notorious book of the series’ (Warne and Colligan 2005: 21), prompting criticism from many directions, and satirical responses such as The Woman Who Didn’t (1895) by Victoria Crosse (Vivian Cory) and The Woman Who Wouldn’t (1895) by Lucas Cleeve (Adelina G. I. Kingscote). As Vanessa Warne

Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle    47

and Colette Colligan note, ‘The Woman Who –’ soon became a catchpenny phrase (2005: 21).5 The novel was widely referenced, parodied, critiqued, discussed and dramatised for the stage and the screen, well into the twentieth century. Neither The Type-­Writer Girl (1897) nor Allen’s other novel written under the pseudonym Olive Pratt Rayner (Rosalba: The Story of Her Development (1899)) excited the same response as The Woman Who Did. For both novels, there were only a handful of reviews, and reviewers seemed unaware that Allen was the author. Allen’s authorship of these works was not publicly revealed until after his death in 1899 (Warne and Colligan 2005: 43–4). Before the publication of The Woman Who Did, which, as the epigraph to the novel declares, was written for the first time in his life ‘wholly and solely to satisfy my own taste and my own conscience’ (4), Allen was famed for writing ‘potboiler’ novels to make a living. Defining authorship as a trade rather than as a calling, he stated in an interview that ‘my line is to write what I think the public wish to buy, and not what I wish to say, or what I really think and feel’ (qtd in Warne and Colligan 2005: 23). Like many of Allen’s works, The Type-­Writer Girl is written ‘to the moment’ (Lucas 2005: 53), that is to say for a reading public of the time, a novel to be sold, bought and read quickly. As such, it openly engages with themes and motifs of the time; while The Bookman in its review names the novel a ‘racy, breezy tale of an unconventional young woman in a very modern London’ (1897: 26), the Athenaeum simply calls it ‘a story of to-­day’ (1897: 348). In this novel, the New Woman and new technologies are at the heart of both the plot and the description of characters. The main character of The Type-­Writer Girl is Juliet Appleton, a stereotypical New Woman: she has attended Girton College, holds radical political views, smokes, rides a bicycle and wears rational dress. Working as a typist, she is economically independent of any man: ‘I have nothing to live upon save what I can earn by type-­writing’ (124). As the narrative proceeds, Juliet comes to work as a typist at two different offices, join an anarchist commune and take a trip unaccompanied to Venice. The first edition of the novel does not, as do Allen’s later New Woman novels, have illustrations – but it does have a three-­colour stamped front cover. In the middle of this cover, a woman (presumably Juliet) sits by her typewriter, holding up a sheet of paper (Figure 2.1). The book is thus signalled as a ‘typewriter girl’ novel or even New Woman novel by the female typist (and her machine) already on the front cover. In the first chapter, Juliet argues that there is a distinct difference between masculine and feminine writing. She draws various examples from literature, history and mythology – ‘[f]rom all which you may

48    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

Figure 2.1  Front cover, Grant Allen (pseud. Olive Pratt Rayner), The Type-­Writer Girl (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1897). National Library of Scotland.

guess that I am a Girton Girl’ (17) – describing her own journey as a modern Homerian odyssey. In addition to the recurrent analogy with the Odyssey, at other points in the novel Juliet compares herself to Esther from the book of the Bible (25 passim), Juliet in search of her Romeo (62 passim), Rosalind from As You Like It (201), Carmen from Bizet’s opera (100 passim), or the princess Cleodolind awaiting rescue by Saint George (229 passim). Juliet criticises the failure of male novelists to depict women accurately, suggesting a fundamental distinction between male and female writing: ‘Men novelists have depicted us as men wish us to be; we have meekly and obediently accepted their portrait: to some extent, even, we have striven against the grain to model ourselves upon it’ (199). Allen, via the character of Juliet, here anticipates the late twentieth-­century feminist critique of his own works, the gynocritical assumption that men’s and women’s writing inherently bear different characteristics. However, there is an irony in this claim of gendered writing, since the novel itself was published under a female pseudonym and has a female narrator. Allen even includes a dedication to lend credence to a woman named Rayner: ‘To Theodore Rayner and Oliver Wendell

Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle    49

Pratt, A Wife’s Homage, A Sister’s Love’ (6). The text is itself an act of impersonation, signalling the constructed nature of gender. As Clarissa J. Suranyi argues, this ‘narrative cross-­dressing’ makes gender categories unstable already from the outset of the novel (2004: 10–11), or at least denaturalises these categories. In its narrative ventriloquism, the introductory discussion regarding the gender of writing indeed foregrounds the blurred interactions between gender and technology seen in the semantic ambiguity of the term ‘typewriter’, and the sexual ambiguity of the New Woman. While Christopher Keep sees Allen’s use of a female pseudonym and first-­person female narrator as a ‘duplicitous’ way to appropriate women’s perspective in order to ‘subvert effectively the gender radicalism of his character from within’ (1997: 43), there might be more fertile ways of reading the novel. As Warne and Colligan point out, there is no evidence to suggest that Allen wishes to undermine the radicalism of his New Woman protagonists; in fact, the literary heroines penned under pseudonym remain ‘among the most unorthodox’ of his New Woman characters since they do not finally ‘capitulate to suicide, neuralgia, or domesticity’ (2005: 45, note 15). Instead, they argue, Allen’s adoption of a female pseudonym might suggest the ‘complexities surrounding male authorship’ within the New Woman genre (43), as well as appeal to the popular market – a crucial consideration for a commercial or ‘potboiler’ writer like Allen. Allen is thus seen as an incarnation not only of the late nineteenth-­century ‘man of letters’, as a ‘cultural mediator’ or ‘sign of the times’ (Greenslade and Rodgers 2005: 4, 17) regarding his position in the literary marketplace, but also as emblematic of the gender confusion at the fin de siècle: ‘Arguably, Allen’s befuddled authorial persona is the quintessential figure of the 1890s, the decade of “sexual anarchy” . . . when gender identity was in flux because of the efforts not only of first-­wave feminists but also of the male partisans of the movement’ (Warne and Colligan 2005: 22–3). At the outset of the novel Juliet is in her early twenties, living alone and penniless without relatives – a common trope in popular New Woman writing – in London.6 Rather desperately, she spends her days reading place advertisements, in search of typing positions. Juliet ponders over the ambiguity of the term typewriter, when reading place advertisements. There is a slippage in these adverts between the machine typewriter and the lady typewriter, and what is at stake in the differing terms is more than the naming of a profession. What comes to be Juliet’s first workplace requires a ‘“Shorthand and Type-­writer wanted (female)”’ (21), whereas her second employer calls for a ‘“Lady type-­writer, with good knowledge of shorthand”’ (116). Juliet much prefers the latter

50    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

title: ‘My theory is that a type-­writer girl should call herself a type-­writer girl; but that an advertiser should do her the courtesy to speak of her as a Lady Type-­writer, or something of the sort: certainly not as a (parenthetical) female’ (116–17). In the typist naming debate carried out in trade journals and women’s magazines, the terms ‘typewriter’ or ‘typist’ signal different ways of regarding the relation between the female typist and her machine. Whereas the first term hovers between machine and operator, the second term can only be applied to the operator herself. In a similar manner to that of the letters in The London Phonographer, the novel through Juliet’s discussion partakes in the typist naming debate, accentuating the typist’s own naming of her occupation. As S. Brooke Cameron notes, the extended discussions in the novel regarding the term ‘typewriter’ (in addition to its use in the novel’s title) which refers ‘both to subject and labour’, could be seen as signalling a ‘feminist collective’ of female typists (2012: 237) whose subjectivities are inextricably tied to the conditions of production. The ambiguity of the term is also seen in The Type-­Writer Girl in the relation between the female typist’s body and her machine. Juliet starts working at the law office Flor and Fingelman’s, whose advert had requested a ‘“Shorthand and Type-­writer wanted (female)”’. However, she does not like the monotonous work there as a ‘(parenthetical) female’ who is mostly viewed as a machine by the other employees. Juliet and her typewriter at times seem to become one, when she identifies herself with her machine: ‘That click, click, click became to me like music’ (32). Despite her dislike for the position, she goes on mechanically: ‘So I continued to click, click, click, like a machine that I was’ (34). For her, the typewriter is her ‘entire stock-­in-­trade, the instrument of production’ (86). As Morag Shiach notes, the typewriter machine can play a part in constructing a sense of selfhood for the typist (2004: 74). Being a ‘typewriter (female)’ becomes a basis of Juliet’s identity. Not only do gender and technology work together, shaping each other; but the female body and the technology in fact at times seem to become one, reinforcing the image of the mechanised female typist. Kittler explains this mechanisation of women, or conflation of woman and machine, with the subsumption, around the turn of the century 1900, of the Romantic equation of woman with nature into the modern equation of women with denaturalised recording media (1992: 347). He argues that as female typists enter the office and start working on the typewriter, these women are seen as mechanised, as machines themselves. We note this tendency to meld together woman and machine in typewriter pedagogy of the time. For example, speed typing manuals required the typist to ‘automate writing within the body’s organic

Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle    51

reflexes, to create an instinctive link between the alphabet and the muscles and nervous system’, storing typewriting mechanically as ‘body memory’ (Olwell 2005: 49). However, this static reading of the female typist as mere machine does not hold when considering Allen’s figuration of the New Woman typist. Juliet in The Type-­Writer Girl is considered by her employer not only as a typing machine, but also as a sexed being. As Pamela Thurschwell points out, Kittler’s notion of the mechanisation or desexualisation of woman does not take into account the simultaneous resexualisation or rematernalisation of women: ‘The typewriter can be imagined as bringing the comforting female presence into the male sphere. The angel in the house becomes the angel in the office. . . . [W]omen are still expected to act like women even in the mechanized workplace’ (2001a: 94–5). An 1892 article in The London Phonographer on ‘Feminine Amanuenses’ exemplifies this specifically female presence, focusing on the outer appearances of the modern female typist as replacing the ancient Dickensian clerk: ‘The dismal old-­ time clerk of Dickens’ day, with his shiny black coat and his scratchy goose quill, has been inexorably supplanted by radiant creatures with fluffy bangs and smart gowns, who pound out of their monotonous instruments an unceasing accompaniment to the merchant’s song of sixpence’ (274). Female office workers are expected simultaneously to ‘mechanise’ and ‘feminise’ the office (Thurschwell 2001b: 158–9). Presented as ‘workplace novelties’ to male employers, colleagues and customers, the female typist alongside other white-­collar women workers is a ‘quotidian object of desire, glamorous yet apparently accessible’ (Mullin 2016: 3). When Juliet applies for the position at Flor and Fingelman’s, one of the clerks eyes her up and down, before asking how many words a minute she can type. At her reply the clerk again runs his eyes over her ‘as if I were a horse for sale’: ‘“That’s good enough,” he said slowly, with a side-­glance at his fellow-­clerks. I had a painful suspicion that the words were intended rather for them than for me, and that they bore reference more to my face and figure than to my real or imagined pace per minute’ (24). The chief clerk also makes sure that both typewriters – the woman and the machine – are to his liking: ‘Got your own machine?’ he asked. ‘Yes.’ ‘What sort?’ ‘A Barlock.’ ‘That’ll do,’ he said, eyeing the rest. And again I detected an undercurrent of double meaning. (24)

52    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

Not only must the machine be pleasing, but also ‘the rest’, that is, the outer appearance of the female typist. Mr Fingelman himself inspects their new ‘typewriter (female)’: ‘He perused me up and down with his small pig’s-­eyes, as if he were buying a horse, scrutinising my face, my figure, my hands, my feet. I felt like a Circassian in an Arab slave-­ market. I thought he would next proceed to examine my teeth’ (26). Juliet’s description of her employer’s predatory voyeurism as eyeing a ‘Circassian’ in a slave market is a specific trope often repeated in nineteenth-­century literature, denoting the imagined ‘Oriental’ backwardness of the supposed trade in fair-­skinned slaves in the Turkish or Ottoman Empire (Brantlinger 2013: 221). Only after having approved of her looks does Juliet’s employer-­to-­be ask her to transcribe a sample. As signalled by the ambiguity of the term typewriter, the female typist is simultaneously sexed and machine, desexualised and resexualised, in texts of the time. While female typists could be seen as being decorporealised in their supposedly mechanised office duties, being viewed as machines, they are also simultaneously recorporealised, being viewed as particularly sexed beings. In this way, Victoria Olwell argues, at the same time as being made machine, the body of the female typist ‘spectacularized gender in the workplace’ (2005: 49); that is to say, made gender an issue to be addressed. As a typist, the woman worker becomes ‘available, visible and sexualized’ (Shiach 2004: 77), a ‘key sexual persona’ of the late nineteenth century inspiring both ‘moral panic and erotic fascination’ (Mullin 2016: 2). The article ‘Ladies in the Office’ from an 1893 issue of The London Phonographer demonstrates how the presence of the female typist is thought to destabilise the office routine: The idea that a lady must of necessity have a separate room to work in, and practically be put in a glass case and hermetically sealed, is fast dying the natural death of such notions, and those who allot their feminine worker a desk in the general office, as a rule find that it is no hindrance but a decided help to office routine. (vol. 3, 57)

This same ‘spectacularisation’ of gender is clearly enacted in the office clerks’ treatment of Juliet in The Type-­Writer Girl. The ambiguity of the term typewriter problematises a determinist reading of the typewriter as a technology bearing inherent values and outcomes. Kittler refers to Heidegger’s definition of technology, in which the typewriter is seen as decorporealising writing: ‘The typewriter tears writing from the essential realm of the hand, i.e., the realm of the word’ (quoted in Kittler 1999: 198). By doing so, argues Heidegger (and Kittler with him), the typewriter degrades the word to a means of communication, removing human particularity from the texts. According

Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle    53

to Heidegger, it creates a rift between the hand-­made and the machine-­ made. Ignoring the possibilities of the human subject and the human body of answering back, of inscribing the technology, such determinism focuses on the impact that the typewriter has on society rather than the use that the individual may make of the machine. However, the typewriter cannot be seen as merely separating human particularity from the text, but at the same time it introduces a new body in the workplace: that of the typewriter operator. When Kittler and Heidegger mark the body as absent in relation to the machine, not only are the many potentialities of technology ignored, but additionally so are the specific notions of gender implicated. In this way technologies are taken out of their social context, and their place within mobile power relations is generally disregarded. We might find a trace of such a determinist definition of technology in Keep’s analysis of The Type-­Writer Girl as a ‘cultural fitting’ of the female typist. Keep argues that in order to be allowed into the workplace, female typists and office workers had to go through a process of ‘cultural fitting’; they had to adhere to a certain kind of accepted femininity. Cultural mediation was crucial for society’s acceptance of this new phenomenon of female typists and office workers. Keep points out that female typists, seeking work in the public sphere of business and commerce, seemed to undermine the association with domesticity which conventional notions of femininity prescribed: ‘Working among men, machines, and money was felt to diminish a woman’s innate sensitivity and moral superiority’ (1997: 402). Keep argues that in order for this new phenomenon of female typists to be allowed and accepted by society, they needed a ‘refiguring of the typewriter within the cultural imaginary’ (403), that is, by ‘secure’ representations of female typists in popular press, advertising and works of fiction. According to Keep, fictional typists are not at all like they were in ‘reality’: Most female typists, in short, lived a life very different from that of the Type-­ Writer Girl of the novels and plays. . . . These novels do not so much document or mirror the life of the woman typist as produce her as the site of erotic attraction for the men who might otherwise be threatened by this sudden invasion of the spheres of masculine privilege. . . . The Type-­Writer Girl thus becomes an object of a particular intense form of male scrutiny that, in the very process of discovering her secret desires, effectively inscribes upon her figurative body the tell-­tale signs of an essential femininity that are required if she is to remain legible within the gendered semiotics of the cultural imaginary of the fin de siècle. (412–13)

Allen’s text is here figured as an attempt to reaffirm a conventional femininity, in order for the female typist to ‘remain legible’ within the

54    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

cultural imaginary. These cultural forms, Keep argues, were ‘a means of domesticating the uneasy association of women with the new machines of uniform transcription’ (422), culturally fitting the New Woman typist into a stereotyped femininity. In Keep’s reading, Allen’s typewriter girl is constructed as ‘the object of a scopophilic desire’ (416); the female figurative body is inscribed upon not only by technologies but also by a sexualising or objectifying male gaze. Following Kittler, Keep sees the body as a site upon which the various technologies of our culture inscribe themselves. Like Kittler, Keep also refers back to Foucault, in particular to Foucault’s notion of a disciplined body – a body to be marked, trained and tortured. Keep uses a similar language when seeing the body of the female typist as ‘inscribed’ by technology, as a ‘disciplined body’, arguing that ‘[t]hus evacuated, the body is possessed, occupied, or “boarded” by the needs of power’ (2001: 151). Technologies are presented as something imposing and inscribing upon passive bodies. However, such a reading fails to acknowledge the ways in which technologies can also be appropriated, as a means of reworking power relations, by subjects themselves. Furthermore, such a reading seems incongruous with the plot of the novel in question; the character of Juliet in The Type-­Writer Girl does not easily settle into that cultural fitting. Juliet herself actively moves between employments, even though she is dependent on earning her livelihood. When Juliet cannot stand work at the law office any longer, she rides her bicycle into the countryside and joins a newly set up anarchist commune. Being now once again ‘a Free Woman’ (40), Juliet labours ‘like a man’ (74) in the fields, wearing her practical cycling suit. Already after a week, however, she finds the anarchists too narrow-­minded for her taste – it is mostly the men who talk politics and toil in the fields, the women having merely followed their husbands, fathers and brothers – and goes back to London to find another typewriting position. Although moving within narrow confines and out of economic necessity, Juliet in this way refuses both to be treated solely as a machine and solely as a woman. Not noting the passages in Allen’s novel where Juliet works in the field with the anarchists, dirties her clothes, and where she cycles around the countryside in rational dress, Keep describes the depicted typewriter girl as ‘not at all that different from her more conventional counterparts. She still enjoyed wearing fine clothes and arraying herself as an erotic object for the male gaze’, representing ‘a kind of eroticised womanhood’ (1997: 422, 416). Considering Juliet’s earlier disgust when being stared at and examined by her male co-­workers, this reading of The Type-­ Writer Girl as a settling or coming to terms with the unease concerning the female typist seems to leave something unexplained.

Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle    55

Indeed, Allen certainly in both his non-­fiction essays on the subject, and in his New Woman novels, is rather ambiguous in his treatment of the New Woman; he seems to promote independent and non-­ traditional female characters while at the same time suggesting specifically female biological urges. In The Type-­Writer Girl, despite attempts to be ‘modern’ rather than medieval, Juliet repeatedly cries over lost romance. The New Woman heroine of another novel of Allen’s, Miss Cayley’s Adventures (1899), provides a similar scene: ‘I dashed into my own room, locked the door behind me, flung myself wildly on my bed, and burying my face in my hands, had a good, long, hard-­hearted, cruel, obdurate cry – exactly like any mediaeval woman. It’s all very well being modern; but my experience is that, when it comes to the man one loves – well, the Middle Ages are still horribly strong within us’ (1899: 140). In many of Allen’s works, essentialist remarks from the narrator or characters often clash with the plot lines or otherwise emancipated views expressed by characters. Chris Willis terms this textual ambiguity the ‘dual consciousness’ (2005: 151) of Allen’s New Woman characters; thousand-­year-­old traditions and biological urges here haunt the modern New Woman. Allen’s portraits of the emancipated New Woman, Willis argues, are repeatedly undercut by references to the heroines’ stereotypically ‘womanly’ instincts: ‘Allen’s self-­styled “mediaeval” woman with strong sexual and maternal urges becomes the doppelganger of the egalitarian “modern” woman’ (2001: 61). However, this ambiguity or conflict is not inconsistent with the period, but might be read rather as part of Allen’s uneasy attempt at ‘carv[ing] out a role for the male author in the women’s movement’ by introducing ‘inconsistencies in his feminism’ and an ‘inconsistent authorial positioning’ (Warne and Collligan 2005: 23–4), or by a necessary commercialising of the New Woman to attract readers – as seen in The Type-­Writer Girl. Recalling the semantic ambiguity of the term ‘typewriter’ at the fin de siècle as signifying an ambiguity in the relation between the typist and her machine, we find alongside the conception of the female operator as a machine the earlier noted texts by typists themselves calling for the necessity of writing ‘with brains’ as well as possessing mechanical capability. These voices stress the agency and skill of the typist, contradicting the notion of typewriting as a merely mechanical occupation. The ­Type-­Writer Girl partakes in this debate: as a Girton Girl, Juliet has studied both modern languages and the classics, which is much appreciated by her employers. It also comes in handy in the multilingual anarchist commune, where she converses in French and tells stories in German to the children, and later when ordering gondolas in Venice.

56    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

Throughout the novel Juliet makes educated references to literary works, mythological characters and historical events. Clearly, her work is not a mere mechanical occupation. However, not all typists are as educated as Juliet. Her friend Elsie in The Type-­Writer Girl is compared to a machine: ‘she could type fairly well, though quite unintelligently, like a well-­trained Chinaman; but she had no machine of her own, and no money to buy one’ (157). She cannot take dictation but ‘given a copy, she could reproduce each word with mechanical fidelity’ (157). Elsie prefers routine to the ‘exercise of intelligence’, and Juliet believes that ‘[a]s long as she was permitted to go on copying like a machine, Elsie was perfectly happy’ (159). Juliet lends Elsie her machine, helps her in the evenings and finds copying work for her from an office. Leah Price argues that the disparity between Juliet as the intelligent secretary and Elsie as the mechanical typist reinforces the equation of the female body with the machine. This is, Price argues, because the typewriter of the novel’s title is not Juliet but in fact Elsie (2005: 131). Price sees the typewriter as creating a rift between the hand-­made and the machine-­made, and also between subject and object, arguing that despite Allen’s ambition to humanise the secretary and give her an inner life, his inability to depict the typewriter girl as a subject instead makes her into an object (133–4). Thurschwell, too, considers the ‘conflicting roles’ of the secretary and the typist in relation to their eventual emancipation. Juliet succeeds in her part as New Woman figure, Thurschwell asserts, perhaps ‘because she is a secretary rather than a typist’ (2001b: 156–7), complicating Kittler’s association of women with mechanical reproduction. These readings, however, fail to note that, importantly, Juliet throughout the novel actively posits herself not as a secretary but as a typist. As Shiach points out, the distinction between the secretary and typist was crucial in the early days of the modern office: the secretary was most likely to be a man (until at least the 1920s), better paid, and there was little mobility between the two positions (2004: 64). In The Type-­Writer Girl, Juliet defends herself and her profession by saying that some typewriter girls are ladies, and that ‘“I am a type-­writer myself”’ (236). Likewise, the earlier quoted trade journals and women’s magazines call for a valuing not of secretarial work but of typewriting work in itself. Having returned from her anarchist excursion, Juliet in The Type-­Writer Girl goes back to her work as a typist, this time in a publisher’s office. She thoroughly enjoys the work here – she even manages to fall in love with her employer – and embraces the freedom that the position as a typist offers:

Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle    57 Poverty emancipates. It often occurred to me how different things would have been had my dear father lived and had I remained a young lady. In that case, I could have seen Romeo [her new employer Mr Blank] at intervals only, under shelter of a chaperone; as it was, no one hinted the faintest impropriety in the fact that the type-­writer girl was left alone with him half the day in the privacy of his study. (140–1)

Given the choice to marry Mr Blank and escape economic hardship, Juliet still chooses the independence of the typewriting profession. She sacrifices her chance of love, announcing that ‘I am the type-­writer girl!’ (260). In the end Juliet reclaims her position as a typist, confidently declaring this in the final words of the novel: ‘For I am still a type-­writer girl – at another office’ (261). Clearly, Juliet characterises herself as a typewriter girl by profession. The two typists in the novel might thus instead, rather than signifying the differentiation between secretarial and typing work, be read as part of the debate about the agency of the machine versus the agency of the human operator. Double writing: The Girl Behind the Keys (1903) If Allen’s typewriting characters in The Type-­Writer Girl can be seen as an interjection in the debate regarding the relation between the typist and her machine, the main character in Tom Gallon’s (1866–1914) 1903 novel The Girl Behind the Keys explores the agency of the typist herself in relation to other agencies. The Girl Behind the Keys employs the notion of the female typist as a mere mechanical transmitter – in fact, the centre plot and the main character’s life depend upon it. But as will become clear, the novel itself counteracts a determinist positioning of the female typist as a merely passive body to be inscribed by outer technologies. Like Allen, Gallon published many works around the turn of the century, works which by now are largely forgotten – the best-­known might be Tatterley: The Story of a Dead Man (1897). Gallon began to write short stories around 1895, after illness forced him to give up a clerical career; he went on to write over forty novels, six plays and numerous music-­hall sketches (Young 2006: 19–20). The front cover of the first edition of The Girl Behind the Keys shows a woman (presumably the protagonist Bella) behind her desk, by the typewriter, with her hands suspended just above the keys, so that she is situated here precisely – as the title of the book suggests – behind the keys (Figure 2.2). She is looking up at a dark-­suited man (presumably her employer), meeting his glance. Similar to The Type-­Writer Girl, the typewriter and its New Woman operator are signalled already on the front cover,

58    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

Figure 2.2  Front cover, Tom Gallon, The Girl Behind the Keys (London: Hutchinson, 1903). National Library of Scotland.

attracting readers looking for commercial New Woman writing. In The Girl Behind the Keys the main character Bella Thorn, living in London with only sixpence in her pocket, starts her new job as a typist at the Secretarial Supply Syndicate. At first the position seems too good to be true: the salary is thrice as high as usual, and days go by without Bella having to do any actual work. However, as Bella soon realises, the Syndicate is a criminal organisation, ‘a den of thieves and worse’ (1903: 68), and by working there she is forced to assist in criminal acts. Bella’s first reaction is to leave her employer, but after persuasion by a journalist friend (who later becomes her husband) she decides to stay in order to expose the gang. Bella continues to work at the office, pretending to be innocent and unknowing, while secretly plotting against the Syndicate. By playing on the image of the machine-­like typist, Bella manages to fool her employer and repeatedly to stop their criminal acts: ‘Having always a placid exterior, I was, to all appearances, as much a machine as that at which I worked; and I think, in time, he [her employer] began to cease to think that I need be considered at all’ (35). She posits herself in the role of the typist as possessing no brains or agency, being ‘purely mechanical’. Bella, pretending not to know of his crimes, tells her

Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle    59

employer Neil Larrard: ‘“You seem to forget that a typist in my position has to become a mere machine; her fingers are the only things that really matter about her”’ (11). The discussion in The Girl Behind the Keys regarding typewriting as a supposedly mechanical occupation can be directly situated in the earlier described debate on the brains required in typewriting work, and the ambiguity of the term typewriter inscribed in this. Unlike Juliet in The Type-­Writer Girl, Bella does not reflect upon the naming of her profession, and her employer-­to-­be escapes this issue by advertising for a ‘“Young lady . . . with knowledge of typewriting”’ (6). The terms ‘typist’ and ‘typewriter’ are then used interchangeably throughout the novel to describe Bella’s occupation. Bella’s employer is never suspicious; neither do the victims of the Syndicate’s crimes seem to consider Bella’s occupation as anything but an innocent one. At a hotel at which she is engaged to work, she finds that the hotel staff recognise her as ‘that very harmless individual, a typist engaged for the day’ (23). When for once Bella is suspected, she replies by referring to her innocence and to her seemingly insignificant role at the office: ‘“There’s nothing much to fear about me, I think,” I said. “You see, when one has to earn one’s living, it makes a difference – doesn’t it? I am only a typist, at a certain salary; it is not my business to enquire about matters which do not concern me”’ (36). Bella even goes by the nickname ‘the Lamb’ among her employer and his associates, because of her supposed innocence: ‘I determined to preserve, if possible, that character of the “Lamb” which had been bestowed upon me; and I think to all appearances I was merely the very ordinary little typist, prepared to receive instructions, and to earn my salary as easily as possible’ (39). She makes use of her innocent looks, and the idea of the supposed mechanical role of the female typist, for her own purposes. A particular episode in the novel features Bella cleverly thwarting her employer’s plans, when the Syndicate tries to smuggle stolen diamonds by hiding them inside Bella’s typewriter, thinking that ‘the Lamb’ will not notice. To them it must have seemed a perfect idea, but Bella knows: ‘I saw the plot in a moment. Who was to suspect a little typewriter, carrying home her machine, after the day’s work, to her lodging. It was the safest and most ingenious hiding-­place that could have been discovered’ (31). However, Bella allows the diamonds to slip out of the Syndicate’s grip, escaping suspicions yet again by feigning innocence, keeping a ‘calm, quiet face’ and going about her work ‘like a machine’ (93–4). By playing on the symbolic idea of woman as machine, Bella in The Girl Behind the Keys on an individual level actively fights against the gang and thwarts their plans. Larrard and the Secretarial Supply

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Syndicate are finally exposed and taken to court – all by New Woman typist Bella’s doing, of course. In The Girl Behind the Keys, the female typist’s body is considered not only as an inscribed and passive surface set upon by technologies, but as an agent capable of answering back. Drawing attention to the many diversities and possible meanings of the term ‘typewriter’ at the fin de siècle, these bodies and technologies are situated within a mobile definition of power relations. The fin de siècle debate regarding the role of the female typist and regarding the nature of typewriting must in this way be considered as containing a variety of voices. On the one hand we have an image of the typist as a mere machine, with no agency of her own – a simple ‘typewriter’. On the other hand, as expressed in The London Phonographer and played out in The Type-­Writer Girl and The Girl Behind the Keys, there is a defence from the side of the typists themselves calling for an appreciation of the ‘brains’ involved in the work, of the agency of the typist. This contradiction is mirrored in the ambiguity of the term ‘typewriter’ itself, which at the Victorian fin de siècle indicates the complex relationship between the female typist’s body and her machine, proving a case in point of the danger of reading the relation between technologies and individuals as a one-­way influence. Reading the New Woman as a figure of early feminism requires an account of agency rather than a technological determinist framework. As power relations are reinforced and negotiated, technologies are also changeable – their meaning and importance lie in how they are adopted. The typewriter is significant in this context not only as a means of earning a livelihood: it becomes a way of reworking power relations, producing discourse and redefining notions of gender in the late nineteenth century. The New Woman typist engages in a kind of, as it were, double writing. She not only, at the institutional or visible level, copies documents, but she is at the same time rewriting or producing discourse, inscribing her corporeal presence into the clerical workplace, that previously exclusively male domain. Neither The Type-­Writer Girl nor The Girl Behind the Keys allow for a determinist reading of technology as inscribing and reinscribing bodies as passive. In this way, fin de siècle discourses on gender are not static, but can be reformulated; the typists’ call for a proper naming of their occupation, and the New Woman typist’s agency in The Girl Behind the Keys, challenge contemporary descriptions of women as unthinking machines.

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Notes 1. The Remington No. 1, also called the Sholes and Glidden typewriter, was manufactured in 5,000 copies in 1873, and the Remington No. 2 came in 1878. See Kittler (1999) for an extensive account of the history of the typewriter, and Stevens (1897) for a contemporary account. As Morag Shiach points out, many writing machines were invented before Sholes’s, but his was developed alongside new office structures, through which the expansion of office work meant that investment in the new technology could be secured (2004: 63). 2. In his 1894 guidebook Typewriting as a Means of Earning a Livelihood, A. D. Southam offers listings of different lodging houses suitable for female office workers. Setting out to provide typists or future typists with useful tips for living as a typist, he also offers information on the length of study, standard salaries, descriptions of the leading machines, and even provides a directory of schools and institutions where typewriting and stenography are taught. 3. All quotes from The London Phonographer refer to volume 1 (1891), unless stated otherwise. 4. In the post-­war era, Elizabeth Baker features working women in her plays, among them typists: the main characters in Miss Robinson (1918) and in Lois (c. 1920) are both typists. In Miss Robinson the term ‘typewriter’ is still employed to signify both the machine and the operator, and both plays thematise the objectification or harassment of female office workers (Fitzsimmons 1992: 192–3). 5. The Woman Who Did ran to nineteen editions in its first year of publication and Allen earned £1,000 in royalties a year from it until his death in 1899 (Warne and Colligan 2005: 21). The novel’s notoriety was lasting: fourteen years later, in H. G. Wells’s New Woman novel Ann Veronica (1909), the heroine’s father bemoans the influence of ‘“these damned novels”’: ‘“All this torrent of misleading, spurious stuff that pours from the press. These sham ideals and advanced notions, Women who Dids, and all that kind of thing”’ (30). 6. As Lawrence Rainey notes, being an orphan or fatherless can be turned to the protagonist’s advantage: ‘not having parents, bereft of traditional constraints as transmitted by family, can both become a version of that “transcendental homelessness” that stamps modernity . . . and signal newly won freedoms of modernity, a liberation from family pressures that accentuates the questions of free ethical choice the heroine must face’ (2009: 293–4). In other words, orphanhood creates ‘a solitary heroine largely in charge of her own destiny, free of parental constraint, pure agency’, who in an extreme formulation becomes ‘the world of modernity incarnate’ (2010: 327). Levy’s The Romance of a Shop (1888) and Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman (1894) both portray young women struggling to earn their own living after the death of their fathers.

Chapter 3

The ‘Freedom Machine’: The New Woman and the Bicycle

Not only are radical political views and ideas associated with the New Woman, but also certain stereotypical emblems, accessories or motifs through which the figure potentially questions established notions of gender. The specific technology most commonly associated with the New Woman and her ‘unsexing’ potential is the bicycle, with the loosening of social restrictions and the geographic mobility that it allowed. The 1897 jocular poem ‘The New Woman to Her Steed’, published in Cycling: An Illustrated Weekly (1891–1900), ridicules this connection by having the New Woman of the poem’s title exclaim: My bicycle, my bicycle   That standest in the lobby With suspension wheels and springs of steel.   My pet, my only hobby! . . . I ask not for beau or cavalier   To help me out of ditches; I go in for independence,   For women’s rights and rational dress.   (1897: 69)

By 1897, then, women’s rights and the bicycle were firmly bound together in the popular imagination. While different kinds of cycles had existed before the introduction of the modern ‘safety’ bicycle, neither the high-­wheeler (commonly called the ‘penny-­farthing’) with its large front wheel nor the more expensive tricycle was widely adopted, as they were reserved for men and women of a certain wealth. The ‘bicycle craze’ started to take shape in the late 1880s, reaching its highest point in the mid-­1890s. It was John Kemp Stanley’s low-­wheel Rover safety design of 1884, with a chain drive to the rear wheel and a year later featuring a diamond frame, which made the bicycle available across classes and genders. Coupled with John Dunlop’s pneumatic tires, which

The New Woman and the Bicycle    63

were added in 1887, the safety bicycle became standard, leading to the stabilisation of bicycle design. Not only were the wheels of the chain-­ driven safety bicycle nearly equivalent in size, which made it far easier to ride than the high-­wheeler and other earlier bicycle models, but the safety bicycle was also democratic in that it was adjustable to suit riders of various body types: handlebar and seat positions could be altered to fit different physiques. Easier and safer to ride than earlier models, the bicycle was now – very importantly – also affordable. The safety bicycle has been considered both by Victorian commentators and later critics to be a technology not only of modernity, but also of democratisation. David Rubinstein calls it ‘not only a practical means of transport but a symbol of emancipation’ (1977: 47), while Stephen Kern terms it a ‘great leveller’ that bridged social space and made travel over longer distances accessible to the middle and working classes, who could not afford a carriage or automobile (1983: 317). Making transport available to all, the bicycle opened up possibilities for both a loosening of social restrictions and an increased geographic mobility. Working-­ class people could now venture on holidays outside of the city, women could travel further without chaperones and into new territories, and some of these women even advocated the less restricting rational dress. As an 1896 report states, conservative social restrictions were challenged by this ‘wheel of revolution’, both in terms of class and gender: ‘Parents who will not allow their daughters to accompany young men to the theatre without chaperonage allow them to go bicycle-­riding along with young men.’ In fact, the author reports, the bicycle also works as a ‘badge of equality’ among its possessors, as it ‘brings all classes together’ when out on the road (‘The Wheel of Revolution’: 231).1 While the modern bicycle has been considered a technology of democratisation, it has been read all the more as the main technology of female emancipation at the fin de siècle, as evidenced by the poem at the start of this chapter. As the specific emblem of the New Woman, the modern safety bicycle was termed a ‘freedom machine’ or ‘vehicle of liberation’ for women (McGurn 1987: 100). It was characterised as the machine which ‘transformed, liberated, and empowered women’ (Bonnell 1990: 229) or which became the ‘impetus that provided women with access to freedom, education, and public spaces’ (Straight 2016: 58). Often coupled with rational dress and sometimes knickerbockers, the bicycle became an emblem of female emancipation. As opposed to horse-­riding, an activity that, like bicycling, had earlier offered women ‘freedom, physical independence and a sense of personal control’ (Wintle 2001: 66), a bicycle was affordable and easy to keep. Thus the bicycle became popular among both women and men among all classes.

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The American suffragist Susan B. Anthony famously stated in 1896 that bicycling had done ‘more to emancipate women than anything else in the world’ (1896: 10). Another well-­known American suffrage campaigner, Frances Willard, learning to ride the bicycle in Britain, saw the bicycle as a new ‘implement of power’ (1895: 73) for women’s rights campaigners. In her 1895 guidebook for female bicyclists How I Learned to Ride a Bicycle with Some Reflections by the Way, Willard rejoices greatly in ‘perceiving the impetus that this uncompromising but fascinating and illimitably capable machine would give to that blessed “woman question”’ (38). This ‘impetus’ would involve not only the improved ‘physical development of humanity’s mother-­half’ (38), which the cycling exercise brought, but also an advancement in dress reform. New Woman writer Ella Hepworth Dixon more guardedly wrote in 1899 that even though the bicycle is seen as having ‘finally emancipated women’, it is certain that ‘there are other factors besides the useful and agreeable wheel’ (2000: 86). Characterising the bicycle as an inherently democratic technology relies upon a technological determinism that measures technology’s impact only as a one-­way influence, rather than through complex interrelations with surrounding agencies. However, as Hepworth Dixon states, the bicycle did not alter society on its own: there are ‘other factors’ involved. As Roderick Watson and Martin Gray note, ‘[s] ociety was obviously ready for a change in manners and morals so far as women were concerned, and the bicycle fitted conveniently into a wider changing pattern. The bike did not alter public mores or fashions of its own, any more than it could do nowadays’ (1978: 139). Indeed, as Wiebe Bijker states, ‘[a]lthough it later became an instrument for women’s emancipation, the first cycles in fact reinforced the existing “gender order”’ (1995: 2), as tricycles and especially high-­wheelers were gendered. Technological development does not happen in a vacuum, but rather is interrelated with the social world, through, for example, potential user demand or gendered uses of the bicycle. But if the bicycle is not inherently democratic, through what processes does it take on this political significance? As Rubinstein suggests, the bicycle is not a mere means of transport but also becomes a symbol of emancipation (1977: 47). The technology of the bicycle offers a concrete physical mobility, and, by this, also works as a more abstract image of democratisation and social emancipation. Literary figurations of the New Woman cyclist epitomise these two aspects of the late nineteenth-­century bicycle, as the bicycle is employed as an emblem or trope of emancipation. This chapter considers the New Woman cyclist as binding together concrete physical mobility and more abstract social and political visions

The New Woman and the Bicycle    65

of female emancipation, mapping figurations of the New Woman cyclist in fin de siècle fiction to demonstrate the various uses of the trope. It also examines the ‘unsexing’/‘sexing’ potential of the bicycle, and the fear of sex reversal by female physical exercise, in periodical press of the late nineteenth century, and the ways in which literary texts partake in these debates and thus work as social and cultural agents. Concluding with a close examination of two novels from the height of the bicycle craze, H. G. Wells’s The Wheels of Chance (1896) and Grant Allen’s Miss Cayley’s Adventures (1899), the chapter complicates the conception of the bicycle as an inherently democratic or emancipatory technology.

The New Woman as Literary Bicyclist Bicycling first became widespread among both sexes in Britain in 1894, with this popularity of bicycling rising until it steadied in 1897 (Rubinstein 1977: 49). According to Rubinstein, ‘almost everyone who could afford a bicycle and who was not physically incapacitated rode avidly during the boom of 1895–97’ (51). The height of the bicycle craze indeed coincided with the New Woman naming debate of the mid-­ 1890s, and the new technology was soon intricately linked to the New Woman’s struggle for independence. Indeed, Hugh Stutfield in the 1895 article ‘Tommyrotics’ conflates the woman writer and the female bicyclist into one, in his analogy of the modern woman writer as a ‘literary bicyclist’: ‘sometimes her machine takes her along some sadly muddy roads, where her petticoats – or her knickerbockers – are apt to get soiled’ (1895: 837). Stutfield’s image binds together questions of female authorship with both the technology of the bicycle and late nineteenth-­ century debates on female dress. With the rise in practitioners, cycling journals sprang up in large numbers, the most popular being Cycling: An Illustrated Weekly, which sold over 41,000 copies per week at the height of its popularity in 1896 (Rubinstein 1977: 49). Daily and weekly periodicals, society journals and women’s magazines provided space for cycle news, while guidebooks and cycling manuals were published in abundance, and cycling clubs were formed.2 One of the first cycling clubs was the first British cycling association particularly for women, the Lady Cyclists’ Association, set up in 1892 to provide rides, tours and social gatherings for lady cyclists, and also publishing a monthly journal (Gordon and Doughan 2001: 80). A. M. Thompson, of the Clarion press, writes in the October 1897 issue of the cycling journal King of the Road, regarding the bicycle craze of the 1890s:

66    Gender, Technology and the New Woman The man of the day is the Cyclist. The press, the public, the pulpit, the faculty, all discuss him. They discuss his health, his feet, his shoes, his speed, his cap, his knickers, his handle-­bars, his axle, his ball-­bearings, his tyres, his rims, and everything that is his, down unto his shirt. He is the man of Fin de Cycle – I mean Siècle. (qtd in Rubinstein 1977: 51)

By 1897, the author of ‘The Cycling Epidemic’ exclaims, ‘the whole Press of the country’ is smitten by the bicycle craze, with an extensive serial literature ‘exclusively devoted to cycling’, dance music devoted to the wheel (‘cycling polkas’ and ‘cycling waltzes’ are examples) and advertisements for cycling costumes and gear, clubs and syndicates ‘in nearly every newspaper one takes up’ (T. P. V. 1897: 59). While the (male) cyclist was the focus of much discussion and publication in the 1890s, the question of the female cyclist was even more widely debated, both in popular and in medical press. Debates abounded not only regarding questions of female physical exercise, and in particular cycling, but also regarding female dress when practising sports. Satirical verses and cartoons depicting the New Woman and her bicycle figured in periodicals such as Punch and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. While twenty-­first-­century readers may struggle to grasp why the issue of female cycling provoked so much debate in the 1890s, the issue can be better understood when contextualised within the ‘crisis in gender’ or fear of ‘sexual anarchy’ at the fin de siècle. While the arrival of female typists in offices, working next to men and machines, was imagined to unsex women, similar fears haunted the debates on women and the bicycle. Doctors either warned against or recommended this new pastime, and popular press ridiculed the supposed consequences for women cyclists. The 1895 satiric verse ‘Sexomania’ by the signature ‘an Angry Old Buffer’, published in Punch, articulates this fear: ‘WHEN ADAM delved and EVE span,’ No one need ask which was the man. Bicycling, footballing, scarce human, All wonder now ‘Which is the woman?’ But a new fear my bosom vexes; To-­morrow there may be no sexes! Unless, as end to all the pother, Each one in fact becomes the other. E’en then perhaps they’ll start amain A-­trying to change back again! Woman was woman, man was man, When ADAM delved and EVE span. Now he can’t dig and she won’t spin, Unless ’tis tales all slang and sin! (‘Sexomania’ 1895: 203)

The New Woman and the Bicycle    67

As this verse illustrates, the bicycle and other types of physical exercise (‘Bicycling, footballing, scarce human’) – like the typewriter – pose a threat to traditional notions of gender. Many late Victorians saw the new mobility offered by the bicycle as destabilising the idea of separate gendered spheres, and the physical exercise as potentially harming female bodily functions, thus portraying the bicycle as causing a collapse or even reversal of gender roles. In the process of sex merging or even reversal imagined above, the woman and man finally ‘in fact become[s] the other’. While debates flourished on whether women should ride, how and in what clothing, and with whom they should ride, the most threatening issue concerning cycling for women initially seemed to be the physical exercise. As Sarah Gordon notes, the new physical culture of the late nineteenth century ‘infused and informed the emerging concept of the “New Woman”’ (2001: 25); indeed, sport can be seen as ‘an important site of feminist intervention, albeit indirectly’ (McCrone 1988: 276). The emergence of women’s sport was to a large extent tied to women’s entrance into higher education, as it was in the public schools and Oxford/Cambridge women’s colleges that many first were able to participate in sports such as hockey, lacrosse and cricket (McCrone 1988). The New Woman’s status as a ‘Girton Girl’ and her longing for independence are thus combined: ‘All forms of exercise’, writes Patricia Marks, ‘were forceable reminders that a woman’s body was her own to control . . . Moving within the relative freedom of the gymnasium or playing field, or more independently wheeling down the road, however, she was responsible for her own health and well-­being’ (1990: 202). The bicycle and a specific sense of freedom, a control of one’s own body, seem inextricably linked. Several New Woman writers, such as Sarah Grand and Olive Schreiner, were devoted cyclists, and Grand especially was interviewed several times about her cycling. Interviewed in the cycling journal The Hub in October 1896 under the vignette ‘Women of Note in the Cycling World’, Grand explains that she mostly rides in the countryside: ‘“After I have been hard at my writing I find nothing more delightful than a spin through green lanes; it is quite a further pleasure in life to go cycling”’ (1896: 419). While she used to go bicycling in London, she ‘“was forced to drop it in town”’ as it made the ‘“menfolk so nervous . . . they endured such agonies on my behalf”’ (419). The interview is accompanied by a photo of Grand standing with her bicycle. Schreiner, similarly, in letters shares her enthusiasm for the wheel. In a letter to her sister-­in-­law ‘Fan’, written in September 1896, Schreiner writes excitedly that she has been given ‘a beautiful new Lady’s bicycle’ by one of her husband’s friends,

68    Gender, Technology and the New Woman

declaring that ‘[i]t’s been the dream of my life to have one for years. I can’t believe I really have one now’ (1896a). In a letter to a friend a few months later, she declares: ‘You will see from this letter that I am quite bicycle mad at present’ (1896b). Willard in How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle notes the importance of the bicycle and physical exercise in questioning traditional gender formations: The old fables, myths, and follies associated with the idea of woman’s incompetence to handle bat and oar, bridle and rein, and at last the cross-­bar of the bicycle, are passing into contempt in presence of the nimbleness, agility, and skill of ‘that boy’s sister’; indeed, we felt that if she continued to improve after the fashion of the last decade her physical achievements will be such that it will become the pride of many a ruddy youth to be known as ‘that girl’s brother’. (1895: 41)

In this quote Willard sees a future where a woman is no longer defined as wife, daughter or sister, and remarks on the traditional ‘fables, myths, and follies’ that physical fitness was not considered appropriate for women. In addition to the threatening physical exercise, the bicycle offered geographic mobility, as women were able to move – if only temporarily – outside the home. With this came a possibly immoral mixing of the sexes, as women were able to travel unchaperoned on their bicycles, and there were stories of elopements by bicycle. In early guidebooks for female cyclists the safety bicycle becomes an almost prophetic sign of female emancipation. Three such guidebooks were published in Britain in 1896: Lillias Campbell Davidson’s Handbook for Lady Cyclists, F. J. Erskine’s Bicycling for Ladies and Mary E. Kennard’s A Guide Book for Lady Cyclists, all sold at a shilling each. Erskine includes illustrations of how to mount, ride and dismount the bicycle, and the volume contains a detailed illustration of the parts of a safety bicycle. Davidson, who had founded the Lady Cyclists’ Association in 1892, comments on being a pioneer of the movement, and on the early fears that the bicycle might be ‘unsexing’ women: ‘Cycling women were regarded with a kind of pious horror by society and by the public at large. It was openly said that a woman who mounted a bicycle hopelessly unsexed herself; she was stared at and remarked upon in town, and hooted and called after in country districts’ (1896: 10). Cycling, Davidson notes, was then considered a ‘masculine’ and ‘unwomanly’ amusement (10). Kennard, too, comments on the difficulty of being a pioneer in ladies’ cycling, and the ideas of gender reversal that it involved: ‘the few persons belonging to the feminine sex, who were bold enough to venture abroad on a wheel, were considered mannish and fast to a degree’ (1896: 1). But by 1896,

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as Davidson remarks, bicycling is now the popular pastime, and female cyclists abound: ‘Fifteen years ago the women who cycled might have been counted by tens; to-­day they number their tens of thousands – nay, hundreds of thousands. Day by day more of them join the ranks, till it is probable that before this century comes to an end those women who in civilised countries do not cycle will be altogether the exception’ (2). Davidson, in a militaristic language similar to that used by later suffragettes, expresses her hope that her guidebook will be of use to this ‘ever-­increasing army of women who cycle – an army which promises to become practically without limit in the coming years’ (5). Debates on female cycling were carried out in both the popular and the medical press, with medical journals such as The Lancet and the British Medical Journal debating the questions of female physical exercise and dress. Erskine in her guidebook refers the ‘medical side of the question’ of female bicycling to those better qualified to answer, but finds among them a plurality of opinions: ‘On the one side there is, I think, almost exorbitant praise – other medical men award qualified or unstinted blame. Who is to decide when medical men cannot agree amongst themselves?’ (1896: 14). Erskine, however, inserts an extract from a paper republished in the Review of Reviews, which strikes her as ‘the most sensible conclusion that has yet been reached on the vexed question’. The extract claims that ‘“there is reason not only to think, but to know, that many women are greatly benefited by the exercise”’ (14). The idea of sex reversal by physical exercise is prevalent in some of the medical discourse of the time, as well as in periodicals such as Punch. Sexologist Edward Carpenter in ‘The Intermediate Sex’ (1894) considers the bicycle, and the New Woman’s use of it, as one of the things having brought about, if not sex reversal, then at least ‘a rapprochement between the sexes’ (1914: 114). Cycling did – to some – seem to be threatening to ‘unsex’ women: not only might it cause the loss of the woman’s reproductive abilities, but also of her feminine characteristics. Mental or nervous disorders were predicted, and warnings were issued about getting a ‘bicycle face’ or ‘face of muscular tension’, a ‘peculiar strained, set look’ caused by the double exertion on both ‘nerves’ and balance when riding (Kenealy 1899: 641; Shadwell 1897: 795). While ‘bicycle face’ along with associated conditions such as ‘Cyclist’s Figure’ or ‘Bicycle Hand’ (Straight 2016: 64) threatened cyclists of all genders, women were considered to be at more risk because of their supposedly delicate physique. As Marks notes, just as in the record of complaints about women’s education, careers and clubs, ‘gender transference was the root behind complaints about women’s athleticism’ (1990: 176), as both mental and physical exercise was argued to lie outside womanly functions.

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The early woman doctor Arabella Kenealy, a graduate from the London School of Medicine for Women, argued that physical exercise as well as education detract from feminine sensitivity. Already in ‘The Talent of Motherhood’ (1890) Kenealy argues that women’s ‘deliberate physical sensitiveness should not be blunted by extremes of exercise, their special intellectual and moral characteristics distorted and deformed by mental strain’ (1890: 458). As a eugenicist, Kenealy’s primary concern is not emancipation for women, but women’s role as mothers. Warning against the perceived dangers of excessive exercise and education for women, she claims that a physically active woman will bear sickly children. In ‘Woman as an Athlete’ (1899) Kenealy laments the present system, ‘which sets our mothers cycling all day and dancing all night and our grandmothers playing golf’ (1899: 644). She claims that it is ‘the subordination and application of muscle-­power to express idea, emotional, intellectual, or moral, which is man’s especial forte’ (638). The woman who exercises becomes brusque, her movements ‘muscular and less womanly’, and her voice becomes ‘assertive’. She does not have time any more for nursing and helping others, as she ‘is off bicycling upon her account’ (640). Physical exercise, Kenealy claims, threatens to unsex the modern woman; such a woman is ‘debasing her womanhood, in becoming a neuter’ (645). However, the debates concerning female physical exercise and bicycling are many-­sided and complex. Kenealy’s article is in fact met by a reply by Mrs Ormiston Chant, who states that the modern woman cannot ‘unsex herself by any phase of manner or custom’; indeed, ‘[n]othing can unsex short of death’ (1899: 754, 750). Chant, in opposition to Kenealy, rejoices that ‘the bicycle, lawn tennis, hockey, golf, rowing, fencing, mountaineering, and a host of other pastimes enjoyed by the modern women’ have taken the place of earlier disciplinary practices (754). Similarly, there were many doctors who recommended female physical exercise. In December 1895, the British Medical Journal contains the piece ‘Cycling for Women’ which includes opinions from ‘several physicians likely to have good opportunities to furnish information on the subject’ (1895: 1582–3) of whether or not women should cycle. Dr W. S. Playfair claims to ‘have never come across a single case, with one exception, in which I had the least reason to think that cycling had been in any way injurious’ and therefore he does ‘not see any reason why cycling should be hurtful, excluding, of course, falls and the like’ (1583). In fact, he narrates having recommended cycling in several instances to young sickly girls, with ‘very beneficial results’ (1583). Meanwhile, Dr Herman states that while cycling is generally good for both men and women, he insists on ladies using a saddle of

The New Woman and the Bicycle    71

proper height and shape, so as not to – by the friction caused – lead to ‘bruising, even to excoriations, and short of this, in women of certain temperament, to other effects on the sexual system, which we need not particularise’ (1583). E. B. Turner (F.R.C.S.) in an 1896 report on cycling, also in the British Medical Journal, clarifies that ‘[t]here is no reason whatever why any sound woman should not ride either a bicycle or a tricycle’ (1896: 1399).

Cycling and Rational Dress There is a crucial link between women’s participation in the bicycle ‘boom’ of the 1890s and the resurgence of the dress reform movement at the time. All three aforementioned 1896 guidebooks for female cyclists include separate chapters on cycling dress, Davidson positing rational dress as ‘certainly the first cause of the present popularity of cycling among women’ (30). In her guidebook Willard sees dress reform as springing naturally from the introduction of the bicycle: ‘If women ride they must, when riding, dress more rationally than they have been wont to do. If they do this many prejudices as to what they may be allowed to wear will melt away’ (39). The ‘boom’ of female cyclists – coupled with the rising popularity of women’s sports – was thus inextricably linked with the return of the dress reform movement. Popular figurations of the New Woman in publications such as Punch most often star the female cyclist in full rational dress, including knickerbockers or ‘bloomers’. Despite earlier mid-­nineteenth-­century movements for dress reform it was not until the 1880s that rational dress and a trouser-­like alternative to skirts regained public notice, leading to the founding of the Rational Dress Society (from which later sprung the Rational Dress Association) in London in 1881. Cycling, according to Willard, proves the most effective way to promote reform in dress: ‘An ounce of practice is worth a ton of theory; and the graceful and becoming costume of woman on the bicycle will convince the world that has brushed aside the theories, no matter how well constructed, and the arguments, no matter how logical, of the dress-­reformers’ (1895: 39). Importantly, as in Willard’s words on the ‘graceful and becoming’ costume of the female cyclist, the Rational Dress Association also places ‘[g]race and beauty’ as one of their ‘Requirements of a Perfect Dress’ next to freedom of movement (1883: 2).3 While the dress reform movement had been marginalised since its beginnings in the 1840s and 1850s, the physicality of newly popular sports – such as cycling – toward the end of the nineteenth century gave it a new impetus, demanding ‘a genre of costume that

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would challenge prevailing ideas of decorum and women’s fragility’ (Gordon 2001: 24). This intricate connection between physical exercise and dress can be seen in the 1907 article ‘Dress Reform’ in the British Medical Journal, which comments on the changes in ‘the machinery of a woman’s dressing arrangements’ spurred by the last decade’s increased interest in women’s sports: A few years ago the case against corsets was no doubt a very strong one, but the modern hockey girl and her analogues, the young women of active habits if not athletic tastes, have of their own accord done much to abolish its old-­time evils. We have never seen more than a decade of this class of young woman, and as she has grown up, dressmakers and corset makers together have been obliged to provide her with the sort of attire which she is prepared to wear. (1907: 543)

In this quote, the fin de siècle is marked as the specific period of this sporting ‘class of young woman’, who by her ‘active habits’ has revolutionised female dress. Perhaps even more than the safety bicycle, or in its connection with it, the wearing of rational dress serves as an emblem of female emancipation. While female bicycling after some years had been more widely accepted, rational dress was still considered controversial. Some critics claim that as the safety bicycle was gendered female, after a decade of men using the high-­wheeler, it was domesticated and possibly made harmless (Mackintosh and Norcliffe 2007: 154). Indeed, some manufacturers sought to neutralise the threat that women’s riding posed to gender definition; for example, by differentiating models of bicycles for men and women, or by advertising linking bicycles with codes of femininity (Gruber Garvey 1995: 69). However, women in rational dress or ‘bicycle suits’ were still often ridiculed. According to the 1898 Cycling: A Handbook, nearly all female cyclists still used traditional clothes: ‘a skirt is used . . . [by] fully 99 per cent of our lady cyclists’ (72). In this way, rational dress might be considered a more threatening technology than the bicycle itself – or as a more threatening sign of it. Emily M. King, by this time honorary secretary of The Rational Dress Association, in Rational Dress; or, The Dress of Women and Savages (1882), sees fashion and the question of dress as epitomising questions of equality at the fin de siècle: ‘In these days the question of the equality of men and women is often discussed, being warmly claimed on one side, and as warmly denied on the other. To me there is no greater proof of the present inferiority [i.e. inequality] of women to men than the way in which women clothe themselves’ (1882: 3). ‘Not only’, she writes, ‘is this barbarous mode of dress a sign of inferiority, but it is also a cause of it’ (4). King’s notion of dress as not only a sign but also a cause of

The New Woman and the Bicycle    73

oppression can fruitfully be compared to the discussion regarding the New Woman cyclist, in which the bicycle becomes an emblem of emancipation. Here the technology of clothing – or rather, restricting clothing – becomes a ‘sign’ (in King’s words) or emblem of inequality, and also a cause of it. The freedom of movement aimed at through dress reform in turn comes to signify or to represent a quest for gender equality on a larger scale. Before considering the ways in which novels and other literary works intervene in the debates regarding female bicycling and dress reform, it is necessary to map how the symbolic and material aspects of the safety bicycle come together in the ‘semi-­fictional’ figure of the New Woman and transform the machine into a symbol of emancipation. The New Woman, as a ‘semi-­fictional’ character, is understood as taking shape simultaneously as a textual concept and as a set of social practices. Rubinstein’s above quote on the bicycle as being not merely a means of transport but ‘a symbol of emancipation’ highlights this duality in figurations of the New Woman cyclist; as textual or discursive concept and as social practice. In the case of the bicycle, the interaction of theory and practice was noted at the time: as in Willard’s above quote, an ‘ounce of practice is worth a ton of theory’. Only when supported by female cycling as actual social practice will ideas (theories) on dress reform be understood. Indeed, the bicycle can be seen as a kind of ‘rolling signifier’ whose potential meanings ‘increasingly expand, shift, and destabilize’ depending on context (Withers and Shea 2016: 6). How, then, can a technology or a social practice which in itself has no emancipatory or progressive value thus attain political and cultural significance? Rita Felski claims the importance of symbolic political practices such as ‘language, imagery, clothing, gesture, and ritual in the maintenance and transformation of social relations’ (1995: 150). Such practices, Felski writes, ‘may play an integral part in the formation of political consciousness; rather than simply expressing an already constituted sphere of “real politics” grounded in the economy of the state, they may themselves operate as instruments of transformation, ways of reconstituting the social and political world’ (150). In other words, social practices such as bicycling or wearing rational dress may take on symbolic and political meanings, thus operating as ‘instruments of transformation’ in reconstituting society. Felski’s consideration of symbolic political practice helps to unravel King’s statement in Rational Dress that contemporary restrictive clothing not only is ‘a sign of inferiority, but it is also a cause of it’ (1882: 4). For King, the way in which women clothe themselves is the ‘greatest proof’ of the inequality between men

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and women, simultaneously a visual emblem of gender inequality and the cause of it. In opposition to restrictive clothing, the bicycle and rational dress become emblems of emancipation, and the freedom of movement aimed at through dress reform also signifies a more general pursuit of gender equality. Dress is thus seen as a kind of ‘embodied practice’ bearing political significance. As Wendy Parkins notes, practices of dress and fashion can be seen ‘not simply as reflecting social and political change’ but rather as situated within a society and its culture (2002: 2). As Gordon observes, in the late nineteenth century the ‘novelty and marginality of clothing for sports provided a space in which women contested notions of “feminine” and “appropriate” bodies, behavior, and appearances’ (2001: 24). At a time when sports posed a challenge to established notions of gender, clothing became ‘a place to negotiate, both verbally and through images’ different ideas of womanliness: the clothing worn for sports displayed what can be seen as a ‘social ambivalence over changing gender ideals’ (Gordon 2001: 47).4 Social practice here assumes a wider significance: female physical exercise, dress reform and political demands become inherently related. Textual and visual figurations linked with this idea of symbolic or ‘embodied’ practice establish a space in which to negotiate established notions of gender – and also to assign a political status to the bicycle. While the bicycle could be characterised as merely a means of transportation, through its connection with the New Woman it comes to signify a specific quest for female freedom. This is shown in the previously quoted Stutfield’s condemnation of the woman writer as a ‘literary bicyclist’, whose mode of transportation signifies emancipatory politics rather than simply geographical mobility. Through literary and visual figurations of ‘modern’ women cycling in rational dress, figurations in which the bicycle and rational dress are employed as tropes of emancipation, the bicycle and the technology of clothing assume a wider significance. Literary texts thus partake in the debates regarding the female bicyclists and their dress, coming to serve as social and cultural agents. However, as we will see, literary texts can complicate the notion of the bicycle as a ‘freedom machine’ or an emblem of democratisation.

The New Woman Cyclist in Fiction Just as the New Woman cyclist is a recurrent figure in the periodical press of the fin de siècle, there is an abundance of New Woman cyclists

The New Woman and the Bicycle    75

in fiction of the time. As Chris Willis points out, popular fiction often uses the figure of the female cyclist as a paradigm of the New Woman: ‘If a character makes her first appearance on a bicycle, it is almost inevitable that she will turn out to be single and well-­educated, with strong views on women’s rights’ (2001: 53). This is the case in both Willa Cather’s ‘Tommy, the Unsentimental’ (1896) and Kate Chopin’s ‘Charlie’ (written 1900, published 1969), where independent New Women combine suitably masculine nicknames (‘Tommy’ for Theodosia and ‘Charlie’ for Charlotte) with a love of bicycling. George Bernard Shaw’s 1893 play Mrs Warren’s Profession employs the bicycle to signpost the family’s daughter as a stereotypical New Woman. Having studied Mathematics at Cambridge, ‘“tieing with the third wrangler”’, Miss Vivie Warren however freely admits that ‘“[o]utside mathematics, lawn-­tennis, eating, sleeping, cycling, and walking, I’m a more ignorant barbarian than any woman could possibly be who hadn’t gone in for the tripos”’ (1898: 162–3). To the dismay of other characters in the play, Vivie Warren adds not just cigar-­smoking but whisky-­drinking to her bicycling and other sporting pastimes. The bicycle here serves as one emblem, among others, of her independence. Although often employed simply as an indicator of a character’s politics, the bicycle also plays a central part in the narratives of not only canonical New Woman fiction but also commercial fiction of the period. Several short stories show the bicycle lending that freedom of mobility lauded by early feminists, allowing characters to gain independence not only in their movements but also in their thoughts. In George Egerton’s short story ‘Her Share’ (1894), the bicycle becomes a way for the newly engaged narrator to escape momentarily the rowdy homestead for some solitude: ‘I wanted to get away by myself, to think, to dream it over again . . . I wanted to escape from congratulations, questions, sympathy . . . I resolved to run down to the country on my bicycle, to get out into the fields and listen to the birds singing, to match the melody in my heart’ (67–8). In addition to offering a physical escape in this story, the bicycle also enables a relational diversion as two strange women come together and share experiences, when the narrator encounters a fellow ‘“visitor on wheels”’ (69), an older woman in a cycling dress, whose life story makes up the main part of the narrative. Kate Chopin’s New Woman character Dorothea in ‘The Unexpected’ (1895) similarly takes to her ‘wheel’ to escape the pressures of the domestic sphere, finding her solitary bicycle ride in the country an escape from her unwanted fiancé. Located in the city rather than in the countryside, Alice Meynell in ‘A Woman in Grey’ (1896) uses the bicycle to signpost the independence of her protagonist not only in regards to bodily freedom, but also

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to her own intellectual independence. In this story ‘the grey figure of a woman on a bicycle in Oxford Street’ (67) speeds through London, her head occupied by thoughts on the question of the female mind. As the unnamed protagonist cycles alongside omnibuses, carriages, cabs and carts, narrowly avoiding accidents while quoting Shakespeare and Dryden to herself, this bicycle journey through the busy London streets comes to describe her own independent way through life: To this courage the woman in grey had attained with a spring, and she had seated herself suddenly upon a place of detachment between earth and air, freed from the principal detentions, weights, and embarrassments of the usual life of fear. She had made herself, as it were, light, so as not to dwell either in security or danger, but to pass between them. She confessed difficulty and peril by her delicate evasions, and consented to rest in neither. She would not owe safety to the mere motionlessness of a seat on the solid earth, but she used gravitation to balance the slight burdens of her wariness and her confidence. She put aside all the pride and vanity of terror, and leapt into an unsure condition of liberty and content. (70–1)

The woman in grey thus describes her physical position on the bicycle, that ‘place of detachment between earth and air’, to mirror her mental state: she is ‘freed from the principal detentions, weights, and embarrassments of the usual life of fear’. Another New Woman character, Cosima in Emily Morse Symonds’ (writing as George Paston) A Writer of Books (1898), similarly enjoys a ‘new and delightful sense of freedom’ on the streets of London (1898: 271), as she learns to ride a bicycle when away from her husband. In this novel, however, the London omnibus rather than the bicycle plays a more central role. While much fiction employs the bicycle to signify the New Woman’s emancipatory politics, certain fiction complicates the notion of the bicycle as a tool of democratisation. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist’ (1903), published in the Strand Magazine in January 1904, the female cyclist is pictured as a danger to the prevalent patriarchal order. Conan Doyle sets the story in 1895, at the height of the bicycle craze, portraying a woman pursued by a stranger on a bicycle. Watson describes ‘Miss Violet Smith, the solitary cyclist of Charlington’ (1904: 3) as young and beautiful. Observing the ‘slight roughening of the side of the sole caused by the friction of the edge of the pedal’, Holmes discerns that his client is an ardent bicyclist (3). She seeks Holmes’s advice because she is being followed by a strange man on a bicycle when she cycles to and from the train station. It turns out that the man following Violet is her employer, disguised, who disapproves of her cycling unaccompanied. As Marilyn Bonnell notes, the ‘actions of solitary female cyclists’ were often considered ‘a

The New Woman and the Bicycle    77

threat to national morality’ – especially when the cyclist is young and unmarried (1990: 222). Violet’s independence in cycling on her own proves perilous when she is abducted and forced into an unwanted marriage. Arriving slightly too late, Holmes and Watson manage to stop this restraint of the New Woman cyclist’s freedom, by proving the ceremony to be illegitimate. While the bicycle in this story is employed as a trope of emancipation, it also offers an implicit warning to the careless New Woman cyclist. While Conan Doyle’s female cyclist narrowly escapes forced matrimony, the protagonist of Mary E. Kennard’s The Golf Lunatic and His Cycling Wife (1902) uses the bicycle to escape temporarily her unhappy marriage. Kennard, author of the aforementioned guidebook for lady cyclists and of various ‘sporting novels’ and stories that thematise female physical exercise, across her literary career transitioned from horse-­riding to cycling and motor-­riding. In The Golf Lunatic, the protagonist narrator Cynthia Jenningham experiences the bicycle as a kind of ‘freedom machine’ for women: What a field of new experiences the cycle opened up to modern womanhood! It freed her from a multitude of conventional shackles. She could wander at her will, go where she listed, stay where she elected; dependent on no man, no horse, no carriage, but solely on the clever bit of mechanism constructed by the ingenuity of human brains and hands. She owed them a debt of thanks, for nowadays she could fancy herself a beggar or a queen according to her proclivities. (1902: 63)

The bicycle is presented as breaking down boundaries of both class and gender, providing both geographical mobility and class mobility between being ‘a beggar or a queen’. This passage in The Golf Lunatic can be compared to the sense of freedom experienced by the bicycling Juliet in Grant Allen’s The Type-­Writer Girl (1897). Juliet has a ‘migratory instinct’ (1897: 116), and when she grows tired of typewriting work she quits her place, puts on her rational costume and rides into the countryside to live in an anarchist community. Juliet praises the freedom gained from both the geographic mobility and the loosening of social constrictions offered by the bicycle: How light and free I felt! When man first set woman on two wheels with a pair of pedals, did he know, I wonder, that he had rent the veil of the harem in twain? I doubt it, but so it was. A woman on a bicycle has all the world before her where to choose; she can go where she will, no man hindering. (50)

In the commune, Juliet teaches her comrades how to ride the bicycle, and works in the fields wearing her rational cycling suit, labouring ‘like a man’ (74) alongside the anarchists.

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Yet another of Allen’s New Woman heroines, the protagonist of Rosalba: The Story of her Development (1899), enjoys the freedom that the bicycle offers. This London-­born Italian-­bred vagabond New Woman, having returned to the ‘artificial conventionalities’ of English womanhood (1899b: 6), states: ‘The bicycle emancipated me; it is the great emancipator . . . Once mounted on a bicycle . . . I was free once more to roam the highways of England, unaccompanied and unchaperoned’ (228–9). Similarly to Rosalba’s characterisation of the bicycle as an ‘emancipator’, Cynthia in The Golf Lunatic calls the machine a ‘deliverer of the female sex’ (211). The freedom brought by the wheel can only be temporary, however, as Cynthia faithfully returns to her unsatisfactory matrimonial life. The bicycle may seem to facilitate social mobility, allowing cyclists of all classes to appear as ‘a beggar or a queen’. Indeed, Kathleen E. McCrone argues that bicycling reached ‘all sorts of women’: ‘While only a few could play hockey, tennis or golf, almost all women could ride. Unlike other women’s sports, which were class specific and effected gradual reform, cycling transcended class barriers and brought about revolutionary changes in social behaviour and perception’ (1988: 184). George Gissing’s story ‘A Daughter of the Lodge’ (1900), however, complicates this notion. The daughter of the lodge is Miss May Rockett, a self-­supporting young secretary with progressive views but without the means to buy a bicycle. The Rocketts inhabit the lodge of Brent Hall, which is the residence of a baronet’s family. The baronet’s daughter Miss Shale sports both a bicycle and an expensive cycling costume, and can – unlike May – take her financial independence for granted. Miss Shale cycles the countryside and argues for women’s rights, but always demands to have the gates of the Hall opened for her by her subjects the Rocketts when returning home. At a progressive meeting where they are both present, the baronet’s daughter ironically laments that not everyone can afford to bicycle, hinting at (or to) the daughter of the lodge: ‘“It’s a pity the machines can’t be sold cheaper. A great many people who would like to cycle don’t feel able to afford it, you know”’ (2002: 269). After May refuses to open the gates for Miss Shale when the latter returns home, the Rockett family are turned out of the lodge and are forgiven only after May gives a forced apology. Gissing’s story thus complicates any straightforward reading of the bicycle as a tool of democratisation, by asserting that ‘all sorts of women’ could not obtain a machine. While the safety bicycle provided opportunities for people of lesser means, restrictions conditioned these opportunities. New Woman fiction thus often employs the bicycle as a sign of modernity and of emancipation. However, writers of the time characterise the

The New Woman and the Bicycle    79

figure of the New Woman cyclist in different ways. Two contemporary novels specifically complicate a reading of the bicycle as an inherently progressive technology: H. G. Wells’s The Wheels of Chance (1896) displays the class specifics of that female emancipation associated with the bicycle, while Grant Allen’s Miss Cayley’s Adventures (1899) employs a hyperbolic figuration of the New Woman for commercial purposes. The class specifics of the bicycle: The Wheels of Chance (1896) Like his contemporary Grant Allen, H. G. Wells (1866–1946) is a particular example of the multidimensional late nineteenth-­century writer of popular fiction. Patricia Stubbs considers Wells the ‘most typical novelist’ of the fin de siècle (1979: 179) in his mastering of various genres, while Holbrook Jackson in 1908 characterises Wells as ‘quite a modern product’ (1908: 381) personifying the meeting of new ideas. Like Allen, Wells was a scientific writer and a socialist: according to Wells, Allen ‘had an earlier infection of that same ferment of biology and socialism that was working in my blood. He wanted not merely to enjoy life but to do something to it. Social injustice and sexual limitation bothered his mind, and he was critical of current ideas and accepted opinions’ (1934: 546–7). While most celebrated as the inventor of the ‘scientific romance’, Wells wrote in various genres of fiction and non-­ fiction. Notwithstanding his at the time controversial writings on sexuality and women’s rights, formulated in novels such as Ann Veronica (1909) or The New Machiavelli (1911), Wells has not been widely appreciated among feminist literary scholars. Instead, he is usually seen as placing his socialist ideas before the rights of women: feminism is still ‘running second best to eugenics and the needs of the state’ (Stubbs 1979: 189).5 Read against a twenty-­first-­century definition of feminism, Well’s writings may be found unfit for purpose; the eugenic underpinnings of works by authors such as Allen and Wells do not survive well outside nineteenth-­century discourses on evolution. However, as suggested by Felski, rather than assigning ‘an invariant kernel of feminist or misogynist content’ to literary texts, we should aim to carry out a more ‘historically attuned’ approach while also acknowledging the text’s capacity to ‘challenge or change our own beliefs and commitments’ (2008: 6–7). Instead of naming authors such as Wells as feminist or antifeminist, examining the literary works to find protofeminist and feminist concerns proves more fruitful. Having learnt to ride the bicycle in the mid-­ 1890s, in many of his writings Wells embraces the bicycle as a potential tool both of technological modernisation and of democratisation.6 Alongside the

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eponymous p ­ rotagonist of The History of Mr. Polly (1910), Wells’s most well-­known bicyclist is the heroine of the ‘discussion novel’ or New Woman novel Ann Veronica (1909), ‘probably the best-­known portrait of the New Woman’ in the last years before the First World War (Scanlon 1976: 133). In this novel, which describes the feminist rebellion of science student Ann Veronica, the bicycle is recalled as a sign of emancipation when the heroine shocks her father by demanding more liberties: ‘I want to be a human being; I want to learn about things and know about things, and not to be protected as something too precious for life, cooped up in one narrow little corner.’   ‘Cooped up!’ he cried. ‘Did I stand in the way of your going to college? Have I ever prevented you going about at any reasonable hour? You’ve got a bicycle!’ (1909: 34)

To Ann Veronica’s father, the bicycle must be the epitome of freedom for a young woman. Later, Ann Veronica comments on the restricting female dress of the time, claiming it as a metaphor for the restricted life that she is forced to lead: ‘“Have you ever tried to run and jump in petticoats, Mr. Capes? Well, think what it must be to live in them – soul and mind and body!”’ (216). As Wendy Parkins notes, in the late nineteenth century a woman with freedom of movement signified ‘a potentially unfettered female agency, which might pose a danger to the stability of social and familial order’ (2009: 2). Freedom of movement in both body and mind correspond in Ann Veronica; the freedom of movement is simultaneously a trope for and the cause of a larger social freedom. Wells had published a bicycle novel figuring an exceptional New Woman cyclist already in 1896, at the height of the bicycle craze of the 1890s. Set in August 1895, The Wheels of Chance (1896) tells the story of Mr Hoopdriver, who, on his first cycling holiday, meets the unconventional Jessie Milton, a stereotypical New Woman and excellent cyclist who wears rational dress. Although Jessie has been regarded as an ‘embodiment of the New Woman’ and as such ‘a clear anticipation’ of the heroine of Ann Veronica (Hammond 2001: 122–3), the novel has been read as Wells’s ‘first social novel’ in its placing of lower-­middle-­class characters as central characters (Young 1999: 101–3), rather than as a New Woman novel. The Academy in their review of the novel indeed notes that while the reader begins by laughing at Hoopdriver as a shop-­hand, they ‘end by sympathising with him as a man’; while on the surface the story is ‘but a rollicking description’ of a holiday, in reality it is ‘a serious essay on the making of a man’ (1896: 423). Hoopdriver considers the popularity of bicy-

The New Woman and the Bicycle    81

cling at the time and envisions people talking about him and Jessie: ‘the imaginary spectators would fall a-­talking of the fashionableness of bicycling – how judges and stockbrokers and actresses, and, in fact, all the best people rode’ (235). The Review of Reviews notes that ‘the very fact’ that The Wheels of Chance is a cycling romance ‘shows how up-­to-­date it is’ (‘Our Monthly Parcel of Books’, 1896: 470), while The Athenaeum remarks that while ‘bicycling romance’ stories occur frequently in cycling newspapers, The Wheels of Chance is perhaps ‘the first that has got into book form’ and is the first to ‘achieve success as a bit of artistic work’ (1896: 752). The Bookman similarly applauds Wells for having written the first bicycle novel readable by those who ‘have not fallen victims to cyclomania’ (1897: 124), while the Saturday Review calls is ‘a delightful book; genial, humourous, tender and altogether wholesome’ (1896: 631). Wells’s bicycle novel provides a rich exploration of issues of class and gender, late nineteenth-­century socialism and early feminism, while placing the interrelation of gender and technology in focus. Hoopdriver is an undistinguished young draper’s assistant in a shop in Putney Hill, London. His recently acquired fascination for bicycling is denoted by ‘the Remarkable Condition of this Young Man’s Legs’ (8), which are full of contusions, abrasions and many-­coloured bruises. The bruises, which can also be found on his shoulders, elbows and even the finger-­joints, tell us both that Hoopdriver is learning to ride the bicycle and that the second-­hand machine is ‘an old-­fashioned affair with a fork instead of a diamond frame, a cushioned tire, well worn on the hind wheel, and a gross weight’ (10). Throughout the novel Hoopdriver is described by his habitual business manners: his tendency to bow and smile, and rub his hands (257), to call young women ‘Miss’ (38) and ladies ‘Madam’ (257), to carry pins on him and inspect tablecloths (258–9), and also by his attempts to overcome these habits when on holiday. As the story opens Hoopdriver is about to set out on his annual ten-­day vacation and first-­ever bicycle tour before he has fully learnt to ride a bicycle. With his new brown cycling suit, ‘a handsome Norfolk jacket thing for 30s.’ and thick chequered stockings (21), Hoopdriver is able briefly to escape his subservient role at the draper’s shop. At the beginning of his journey a heath-­keeper, annoyed because Hoopdriver does not want to stay and talk to him, calls out: ‘“’E’s a bloomin’ dook, ’e is. ’E don’t converse with no one under a earl. ’E’s off to Windsor, ’e is; that’s why ’e’s stickin’ his be’ind out so haughty. Pride!”’ (27). This scolding does not anger Hoopdriver – quite the opposite: he is satisfied at the prospect of having been mistaken for a duke. As he soars down a hill, with his feet

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upon the foot-­rests, Hoopdriver says repeatedly to himself and laughs: ‘“He’s a bloomin’ dook – he is!”’ (29). On a bicycle outside of the city, Hoopdriver can momentarily escape class conventions: No more Manchester Department for ten days! Out of Manchester, a Man! The draper Hoopdriver, the Hand, has vanished from existence. Instead was a gentleman, a man of pleasure, with a five-­pound note, two sovereigns, and some silver at various convenient points of his person. At any rate as good as a dook, if not precisely in the peerage. (29–30)

Another passer-­by calling Hoopdriver a ‘“gentleman wizzer bicitle”’ (42) further exalts him. Hoopdriver thus sets out in his best mood, delighted by the sense of freedom offered by the bicycle. Initially, the bicycle seems to be just that machine of democratisation or ‘great leveller’, a technology bridging social space. Hoopdriver’s vacation turns into a real adventure when repeated chance encounters bring him together with a ‘Young Lady in Grey’: the New Woman cyclist Jessie. Jessie is an accomplished cyclist while Hoopdriver is clearly a novice, and neither Hoopdriver nor his second-­ hand bicycle are accustomed to meeting women. Hoopdriver regards ‘the feminine sex’ as something to bow to and smirk at from the other side of the counter (32). On a bicycle in the countryside, however, these conventions do not hold. The bicycle becomes ‘convulsed with the most violent emotions directly the Young Lady in Grey appeared’ (33) and begins to wobble unprecedentedly. At the mere sight of this woman on a bicycle, Hoopdriver is made insecure: ‘Her handles glittered; a jet of sunlight splashed off her bell blindingly. She was approaching the high road along an affluent from the villas of Surbiton’ (33). Jessie herself, her shiny new bicycle and even the direction from which she is coming – the villas of Surbiton – overwhelm the young draper’s clerk from Putney. As their roads converge slantingly, appearances point to a meeting at the fork of the roads. Noting that ‘[b]y contrast with her he rode disgracefully’ (34), Hoopdriver considers getting off the bicycle and pretending that something is wrong with his treadle – but he has not yet learnt to dismount. To go slow seems ‘the abnegation of his manhood’, but to cycle before her seems an incivility – as a draper’s clerk, his training has made him ‘prone to bow and step aside’. Meanwhile, the roads converge: ‘She was looking at him. She was flushed, a little thin, and had very bright eyes. Her red lips fell apart. She may have been riding hard, but it looked uncommonly like a faint smile. And the things were – yes! – rationals! Suddenly an impulse to bolt from the situation became clamorous’ (34). This figuration of the New Woman cyclist in rational dress, and Hoopdriver’s reaction, illustrates Gordon’s claim that the

The New Woman and the Bicycle    83

new clothing for sports provided a ‘space in which women contested notions of “feminine” and “appropriate” bodies, behavior, and appearances’ (2001: 24). While the ‘bright eyes’ and ‘red lips’ of Wells’s female cyclist enchants Hoopdriver, her rational dress takes him by surprise, making him want to ‘bolt from the situation’. Pedalling convulsively to try to pass the young lady, he ends up crashing right in front of her. Riding straight into a wooden fence and shooting forward off his saddle ‘into a clumsy entanglement’, Hoopdriver tumbles over sideways and finally completed the entire figure in a sitting position on the gravel, with his feet between the fork and the stay of the machine. The concussion on the gravel shook his entire being. He remained in that position, wishing that he had broken his neck, wishing even more heartily that he had never been born. . . . Bloomin’ dook, indeed! These unwomanly women! (37)

This figure is illustrated by J. Ayton Symington: an angered Hoopdriver crawling on the pavement, his legs tangled in his machine, his hat flown off, he staring up at the elegantly approaching female cyclist in knickerbockers and a perky little cycling hat (Figure 3.1). Hoopdriver’s position on the pavement, coupled with her cycling skills, is worsened by her being a woman – a girl, even: ‘She had a pretty, clear, girlish voice. She

Figure 3.1  ‘A sitting position on the gravel’, in H. G. Wells, The Wheels of Chance: A Holiday Adventure (London: J. M. Dent, 1896). Cornell University Library.

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was really very young – quite a girl, in fact. And rode so well! It was a bitter draught’ (37). Having supplied Hoopdriver with some sticking plaster for his newly acquired bruises, the Young Lady in Grey cycles away. Infatuated with this lady cyclist, Hoopdriver speculates on ‘what manner of girl she might be’: Probably she was one of these here New Women. He had a persuasion the cult had been maligned. Anyhow she was a lady. And rich people, too! Her machine couldn’t have cost much under twenty pounds. His mind came round and dwelt some time on her visible self. Rational dress didn’t look a bit unwomanly. (42)

While when first falling over he had been dismayed by ‘unwomanly women’ on bicycles, Hoopdriver now considers Jessie graceful and ‘[not] a bit unwomanly’. As noted previously, many dress reformers emphasised the ‘womanly’ grace involved in cycling and rational dress. When now considered as a middle-­class ‘lady’ in possession of a costly machine, the Young Lady in Grey does not seem ‘unwomanly’ at all. Later in the novel Hoopdriver further notes ‘her ankles gracefully ruling the treadles’ (161, italics added). While physical exercise and bicycling in particular caused much debate because of its ‘unsexing’ potential, the female cyclist is here also specifically sexed. The encounter between these two young people of different classes and genders, alone on a country road, is a novelty made possible by the bicycle. Inspired by the earlier comments about him as a ‘gentleman wizzer bicitle’ and a ‘bloomin’ Dook’, Hoopdriver says to himself that he ‘“can’t look so very seedy”’ (42), and perhaps not all that unworthy of such a ‘Lady’. Such are his thoughts, unaware of the comment from an ‘other man in brown’ who stands by the road repairing a tyre on his machine of ‘dazzling newness’, who characterises Hoopdriver as a ‘“Greasy proletarian”’. Ignorant of this remark, Hoopdriver cycles happily through the green English countryside, enthusiastic about that ‘wide sympathy that binds all cyclists together . . . the brotherhood of the wheel’ (52). The eighteen-­year-­old Jessie does indeed belong to the ‘cult’ of ‘these here New Women’. In an attempt to escape from the confines of conventionality and her stepmother, she has left home on her bicycle, leaving behind only a brief note declaring her independence, a note containing ‘extensive and very annoying quotations’ from a best-­selling anti-­marital New Woman novel (175). Hoopdriver encounters her a second time when she is standing by the roadside waiting for Bechamel – the aristocratic man in brown who is now late because of the punctured tire.

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Hoopdriver manages to dismount to greet her, but is soon ashamed of the discrepancy between her ladylike ways and his own ungentlemanly manners and accent. As it turns out, Bechamel is a family friend who has promised to help Jessie get an independent start in life. His real intention, however, is to make Jessie’s journey for independence seem like an elopement, compromising her and awakening her passion for him. Bechamel suspects Hoopdriver of being a private detective engaged to follow the couple. This notion suits Hoopdriver’s imaginative mind and he plays the role, pursuing them in order to protect the lady. During one of Hoopdriver’s enquiries about the couple, a shocked barmaid claims to have had her ‘modesty’ much impressed by the young lady’s costume and laments the young woman’s forward manner and way of bossing around her ‘brother’ (122). The barmaid complains that surely that young woman will ‘“be a nice lot to marry . . . She’ll be wearing the – well, b-­dashes, as the sayin’ is. I can’t think what girls is comin’ to”’ (125). Paraphrasing a few lines about the ‘unsexing’ potential of the New Woman from the previously quoted Punch poem ‘Sexomania’, she laments that ‘“[t]here’ll be no knowing which is which in a year or two”’ (122). Hoopdriver, the self-­professed gentleman, defends both Jessie’s behaviour and her attire. He even tells the barmaid that, as fashion goes, she will be wearing bloomers herself ‘before a couple of years is out’ (125). When Jessie discovers Bechamel’s intention, she abandons him for Hoopdriver. Together they gain a further taste of the scorn that female cyclists – especially in rational dress – had to endure in the 1890s, when entering a village inn. While the narrator declines to reveal the precise nature of the insult hurled at Jessie, Hoopdriver challenges the disrespectful man to a fight, after telling the man that his joke was ‘“downright disgusting . . . A lady can’t ride a bicycle in a country road, or wear a dress a little out of the ordinary, but every dirty little greaser must needs go shouting insults”’ (244). We see here how social practices such as clothing and bicycling function as spaces in which to ‘negotiate, both verbally and through images’ different ideas of femininity (Gordon 2011: 47). The barmaid considers Jessie’s rational dress as diminishing sexual differences (‘“There’ll be no knowing which is which in a year or two”’) and questions Jessie’s suitability for marriage on the basis of her bloomer-­like cycling trousers. The narrator of The Wheels of Chance states that if a woman puts on a ‘really modern cycling costume’ and ventures on a bicycle ride, she will most certainly receive insulting remarks (236). Through these instances in the novel, Wells’s text directly partakes in the fin de siècle debates regarding the female cyclist and her supposed ‘unsexing’ potential. Having escaped Bechamel with his help, Jessie names Hoopdriver her

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‘Knight-­errant’ (164), and asks him for his Christian name. Ashamed of his ungentlemanly name, Hoopdriver creates one. Hoopdriver now elevates himself from private detective to chivalrous hero; he is ‘in the world of Romance and Knight-­errantry, divinely forgetful of his social position or hers’ (148). Both Jessie and the guests at the hotels and inns that they pass believe Hoopdriver to be a gentleman. When he lights their bicycle lamps, the two come closer than social conventions would usually allow: ‘She came round obediently and took his machine, and for a moment they stood face to face. “My name, brother Chris,” she said, “is Jessie”’ (167). The bicycle functions as a bridge between the classes, reducing the social distance between Hoopdriver and Jessie. She now pretends to be Hoopdriver’s sister, and they address each other by first names. When they spend the night in a hotel, even the narrator is shocked by the breach of social conventions: Here is the girl – what girls are coming to nowadays only Mrs. Lynn Linton can tell! – in company with an absolute stranger, of low extraction and uncertain accent, unchaperoned and unabashed . . . Then this Mr. Hoopdriver of yours . . . in illegal possession of a stolen bicycle, a stolen young lady, and two stolen names, established with them in a hotel that is quite beyond his means . . . There are occasions when a moralising novelist can merely wring his hands and leave matters to take their course. (171–2)

The encounter between Hoopdriver and Jessie is a breach of social conventions of both class and gender. Referring to the notable Victorian antifeminist Mrs [Eliza] Lynn Linton, who in several essays lamented ‘The Girl of the Period’ (1868), ‘The Shrieking Sisterhood’ (1870) and ‘The Partisans of the Wild Women’ (1892), the narrator adopts the voice of the moralising Victorian public. Lynn Linton especially railed against women’s use of the bicycle, most notably in the 1896 article ‘The Cycling Craze for Ladies’, in which she characterises the sport as an ‘essentially vulgar institution’, and critiques the ‘fast and foolish wheelwomen’ for their ‘modern passion for imitation of the manly life’ (1896: 174). The rescue party that later catches Jessie has a Lynn Linton of its own in the figure of Jessie’s former schoolmistress Miss Mergle, who cannot conceive ‘“[w]hat girls are coming to . . . Or where they get these extraordinary ideas”’ (298). When Jessie tries to account for her actions, Miss Mergle continues ‘her copious outpourings about Ideals, True Womanliness, Necessary Class Distinctions, Healthy Literature, and the like’ (302). The novel itself in this way incorporates its own scandalised Lynn Linton, letting the figure comment on the evils of books such as the one in which the character herself figures. As a stereotypical New Woman – decried by Lynn Linton and Miss Mergle – Jessie reads Books with Ideas, flees a conventional home

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Figure 3.2  ‘“Here we can talk”’, in H. G. Wells, The Wheels of Chance: A Holiday Adventure (London: J. M. Dent, 1896). Cornell University Library.

and cycles in rational dress. During a rest along the way, Jessie tells Hoopdriver: ‘“I am resolved to Live my Own Life. . . . I want to write, you see . . . to write Books and alter things. To do Good. I want to lead a Free Life and Own myself. I can’t go back . . . I am resolved to be Unconventional – at any cost”’ (191–3). This scene of intimate conversation between the two of them, alone in the countryside, is one of many such moments captured by Symington. One specific illustration shows the pair’s bicycles pictured in the foreground, the two machines resting close together as if signalling the familiarity between their owners in the background (Figure 3.2). As the journey continues, Jessie is disappointed that things are not working out as she had thought – or, rather, as she has read about in books: ‘She had read her Olive Schreiner and George Egerton, and so forth, with all the want of a perfect comprehension of one who is still emotionally a girl. She knew the thing to do was to have a flat and go to the British Museum and write leading articles for the daily papers until something better came along’ (254). Jessie explains to Hoopdriver that she wants to live independently of her stepmother, and that she is thinking of ‘“writing Books . . . [o]r doing Journalism, or Teaching, or something like that. . . . Women, you know, edit most papers nowadays, George Egerton says”’ (281). Like the capitalisation of the initial letters of the New Woman, the initial capital letters here

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(Live one’s Own Life, write Books, do Good, be Unconventional, do Journalism or Teaching, et cetera) signify these as concepts, abstract ideas, rather than concrete objects and occupations. These concepts thus gain a wider symbolic significance. Jessie’s schooling in New Woman literature, and Hoopdriver’s tendency to daydream himself into different roles, comes out when she tries to discover Hoopdriver’s profession. She guesses that he comes from the colonies, and more specifically, South Africa: ‘“What made me think of South Africa was that novel of Olive Schreiner’s you know – ‘The Story of an African Farm’. Gregory Rose is so like you”’ (201). Hoopdriver, being born in a London suburb, happily agrees to Jessie’s suggestions inspired by Schreiner’s influential New Woman novel. This is just one of the instances in the novel where literature precedes ‘real life’. The narrator explains that Jessie’s ‘knowledge of the world was rather less than nothing, having been obtained entirely from books’ (198). These lines recall the popular Punch illustration from 1894, as noted in Chapter 1, of the New Woman as a female Don Quixote surrounded by books and also reading one, with the accompanying quote paraphrasing Cervantes’ novel: ‘A world of disorderly notions picked out of books, crowded into his (her) imagination’ (‘Donna Quixote’). Literary texts are here described in the novel as agents of cultural and social change: Wells’s New Woman cyclist acts as she believes that a New Woman cyclist should act – bicycling, wearing rational dress – and thus employs the very same idea that she has read about in books. Jessie forms her ideas from notions found in books: the novel thus highlights the ‘semi-­ fictional’ nature of the New Woman both as a textual or literary concept and as a set of social practices. Emancipatory ideals and ideas, however, might not be as straightforward in life as they appear in novels. While Jessie tells Hoopdriver about her aspirations in life, he is secretly calculating the costs of the journey. Just as he has noted the newness and probable cost of Jessie’s bicycle, and her clear upper-­class diction, he has also been worrying about money throughout their entire journey. Highlighting this disparity between the two characters, the novel complicates the reading of the bicycle as a technology of democratisation and female emancipation and instead exposes the New Woman as a primarily middle-­class construct. The specifics of social position and class are noted throughout the novel in Hoopdriver’s submissive manner toward the young lady, and in his need to lie about his origins and occupation, but perhaps most clearly in Jessie’s ignorance regarding monetary issues. When Hoopdriver exposes his true position as a draper’s assistant, Jessie only understands his previous lies to be because he thought that she was ‘too Conventional’

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to take help from one she might think ‘her social inferior’ (265), and immediately forgives him. When Hoopdriver is at last forced to raise the question of money, Jessie admits that this issue never crossed her mind: ‘“I never thought of money coming in to stop us like this . . . Money! . . . Is it possible –? Surely! Conventionality! May only people of assured means Live their own Lives? What a curious light –!”’ (283). Clearly, this is the first time that Jessie considers the privileged position of being able to become a (middle-­class) New Woman, trying to Live her Own Life. Their adventure ends when her stepmother, shocked that Jessie has ‘flaunted her freedom – on a bicycle, in country places’ (228), sends out a rescue expedition. Hoopdriver laments to himself the way that Jessie’s relatives now ‘snatched her away from him as though he was scarcely fit to live on the same world with her. No more he was!’ (303). The bicycle’s figuration as bringing universal (or specifically female) emancipation is complicated in The Wheels of Chance, as cycling is still a pastime for people of some means. Having realised this, Jessie agrees to return home. She explains to her stepmother: ‘“Women write in books about being free, and living our own life, and all that kind of thing. – No one is free, free even from working for a living, unless at the expense of someone else. I did not think of that”’ (299). This is the last that the reader sees of Jessie, who presumably returns to her place in conventional Victorian womanhood. Hoopdriver meanwhile returns to his place behind the counter. For him, the supposed freedom of the wheel and the potential breach of social conventions it allows can only be temporary. By displaying the class specifics of that emancipation associated with the bicycle, The Wheels of Chance thus not only celebrates the possibilities of the bicycle but also complicates the characterisation of the bicycle as an inherently progressive technology. Highlighting the ‘semi-­ fictionality’ of the New Woman, the figure’s simultaneous emergence as a literary concept and as a set of social practices such as cycling or wearing rational dress, the novel in fact displays that it is through literary figurations that the bicycle takes on the significance of and thus becomes an emblem of democratisation and emancipation. Commercialising the New Woman: Miss Cayley’s Adventures (1899) While Wells’s figuration of Jessie Milton complicates a reading of the New Woman cyclist as a purely emancipatory figure, Allen’s Miss Cayley’s Adventures (1899) through its New Woman cyclist comments

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upon the growing commercial interests of the late Victorian literary market. Lois Cayley, the New Woman protagonist of Miss Cayley’s Adventures, by her employment with technology builds an almost hyperbolic image of the New Woman. Not only does she, like Juliet in The Type-­Writer Girl and Bella in The Girl Behind the Keys, support herself by typewriting, but she sets up a typewriting business in Italy, and travels the world by writing articles as a foreign correspondent ‘simply in search of adventure’ (1899a: 4). Like Jessie in The Wheels of Chance, Lois enjoys bicycling, but in addition to this she wins a bicycle race against all male competitors, and sells bicycles in Switzerland as a commission agent for an American manufacturer. The Saturday Review notes this unrealistic plot as the major flaw of the novel, considering the stories ‘as replete with inconsequent absurdity as a modern farce’, and even declaring that the illustrations ‘are the best things in the book’ (1899: 598). The Athenaeum is less critical, noting the novel as ‘lively entertainment’ only marred occasionally by some ‘vulgar touches’ (1899: 749). The Academy in their short review places the novel, which is ‘told with much spirit’, in the context of the rise in detective fiction, characterising Lois Cayley as ‘a female Sherlock Holmes’ (1899: 508). While none of these early reviews note specifically the centrality of the bicycle or the typewriter in the novel, these technologies and social practices become spaces through which the character embodies the emancipatory ideals associated with the New Woman figure. This hyberbolic figuration of the New Woman cyclist, however, cannot be read simply as a celebration of female emancipation via the bicycle: the figure of the New Woman is also bound up with commercial interests. Miss Cayley’s Adventures was published as a novel in 1899, but had previously been serialised in the Strand Magazine in 1898–9. Late Victorian mass-­ circulation magazines such as the Strand were not separate from the commodity culture of the late nineteenth century, but took shape in relation to the rise in advertising at the time. While Ross D. Petty argues that bicycle advertising in such magazines led to ‘the identification of the emerging middle class, particularly the “new woman” of the 1890s’, and that bicycle advertisers by being among the first to present ‘media images of women as active, independent people who enjoyed recreational pursuits thereby advanc[ed] the cause of women’s emancipation’ (1995: 33), Ellen Gruber Garvey’s analysis of the gender politics involved takes a different direction. Examining the commercial interests within debates regarding women cycling, Gruber Garvey considers how advertising during this period makes its way into fiction through certain commercialised ‘[p]roduct-­focused stories’ that embed products in a social context and associate them with romance,

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happiness, freedom and social acceptance (1995: 67). In the case of the bicycle, magazine fiction might thus come to contain or defuse the threat of the new freedoms that the bicycle had come to signify. While there are also writings that parody or subvert commercialised, formulaic fiction, Gruber Garvey proposes that mainstream magazines, by their advertising and formulaic fiction, reinstate conventions rather than subvert them and subsume the potential conflict within a ‘discourse of consumption’ (89–90, 96). Similarly, in the case of Miss Cayley’s Adventures, potential commercial interests may be read as either underlining or containing the New Woman cyclist’s threat to established gender norms. Lois is repeatedly described in relation to the bicycle and physical exercise, Allen often using the technology as an emblem of freedom or emancipation to describe her character. Lois explains her high spirits, despite being penniless, by her ‘having large dark eyes, with a bit of a twinkle in them, and being as well able to pilot a bicycle as any girl of my acquaintance’ (6). Lois is marked not only by her sharp intellect, but even more so by her physical vigour. She was one of the first female bicyclists, frightening the other girls at Girton College with her audacity. Lois’s friend Elsie explains: ‘“You see, you had a bicycle . . . and in those days, of course, ladies didn’t bicycle. You must admit . . . it was a startling innovation. You terrified us so”’ (3). Lois is not just an expert cyclist, but as she tells her admirer Harold she is ‘“a fairly good climber”’ and after Cambridge her accomplishments run towards ‘“rowing, punting, and bicycling”’ (47, 74). She later proves to be an excellent mountaineer, when rescuing Harold from a precarious mountainside. The New Woman’s physical strength here seems to be posing a threat to traditional notions of gender, as Lois’s activities correspond well with the ‘unsexed’ woman of the earlier quoted parodic Punch poem: ‘Bicycling, footballing, scarce human, / All wonder now “Which is the woman?”’ (‘Sexomania’ 203). Indeed, at one point she receives a letter from her aunt, who writes to rebuke Lois for her ‘unladylike’ (119) conduct in becoming a bicycle commission agent. At the outset of the novel, Lois has just completed her Mathematics studies at Girton College and, at age twenty-­one, is left penniless in London by the death of her stepfather. Lois views the situation as an opportunity: ‘On the day when I found myself with twopence in my pocket, I naturally made up my mind to go round the world’ (1). This determination is illustrated on the novel’s front cover, which pictures the protagonist standing in front of a sunrise, with one hand on her hip, and her right foot resting on a globe of the Earth. Lois starts her journey as a travelling companion to ‘the Cantankerous Old Lady’ Georgina, and already in the first adventure thwarts an attempt to steal the elderly

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lady’s jewellery. Having resolved to go around the world, Lois soon leaves her employer to seek new adventures. While cycling in southern Germany, she is noticed by the American bicycle inventor and manufacturer Mr Hitchcock, who engages her to run in a racing competition. Just as Juliet in The Type-­Writer Girl identifies with her typewriter machine, Lois identifies with her bicycle. When first trying the bicycle offered to her by Hitchcock, she describes a feeling of being one with the machine: ‘’Twas a pre-­ordained harmony. After two or three trials I felt that the Manitou was built for me, and I was built for the Manitou. We ran together like parts of one mechanism’ (74). Almost mechanically, Lois pedals away ‘like a machine’, her ankles flying round ‘so that I scarcely felt them’ (81). Hitchcock hires Lois to ride his newly invented four-­geared mountain bicycle ‘the Manitou’ for him in a bicycle race, in order to introduce the machine on the market. Indeed, the practice of linking bicycle advertising to the performance of bicycle racers was commonplace during the late nineteenth century (Petty 1995: 40). However, Hitchcock does this not only because of Lois’s cycling abilities, but also because she is a woman – and this bears commercial possibilities. Throughout the novel Lois’s specific ‘womanly’ attributes are highlighted and play a crucial part in the narrative; her physical exercise is even more emphasised by being contrasted by her ‘womanliness’. While Juliet in The Type-­Writer Girl is eyed by her employer at the typing office ‘as if I were a horse for sale’ (1897: 24), Lois receives the same examination by the American bicycle inventor: ‘He looked me all up and down. “You’re a lady of con-­ siderable personal attractions,” he said, musingly, as if he were criticising a horse; “and I want one that sort”’ (65). This visual evaluation is illustrated by Gordon Browne, showing Hitchcock looking Lois up and down as she stands by her bicycle (Figure 3.3). In his world of commercialism and advertisement, Hitchcock can apparently distinguish women of this or that stereotyped ‘sort’. The inventor tells Lois that there is some ‘style’ about her, and explains that Lois is hired partly because of her ‘attractiveness’: ‘“It ain’t only your skill, you see,” Hitchcock said, with frank commercialism. “It’s your personal attractiveness as well that I go upon. That’s an element to consider in business relations”’ (74). Like Juliet in The Type-­Writer Girl, Lois is evaluated for her ‘womanly’ qualities, including her physical attributes. As Clare Simpson notes, at a time when men’s cycle races were no longer a novelty, thousands of people enjoyed ‘the spectacle of women’s cycle racing’ (2007: 47). In the commercial context of cycle racing, the appearance of female cyclists at large racing events played an important role in assisting manufacturers and retailers by marketing their cycles.

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Figure 3.3  ‘“Seems I didn’t make much of a job of it”’, in Grant Allen, Miss Cayley’s Adventures (London: Grant Richards, 1899). University of Alberta Libraries.

The figure of the New Woman was specifically linked to cycle racing, in that many advertisements showed New Women on racing models or at the very least ‘riding swiftly and dressed in rational costumes’, most often on traditional ‘male’ machines (Simpson 2007: 58–9).7 Miss Cayley’s Adventures shows an evident awareness of the commercial possibilities of women racing. When hiring her for the race, Hitchcock states contently: ‘“You hev some go in you, you hev. There’s money in your feet”’ (72). When Lois at first does not understand his proposition, Hitchcock explains: ‘“Well, it’s like this, don’t you see; ef a female wins, it makes success all the more striking and con-­spicuous. The world to-­day is ruled by advertizement”’ (73). As Hitchcock later tells her, once they let Lois ‘run and win’, the prize money does not matter to him (that is, he does not care if Lois is disqualified afterwards for being a woman): ‘“It’s the advertizement that tells. Jest you mark my words, miss, and don’t you make no mistake about it – the world is governed to-­day by advertizement”’ (75). Through the words of the American inventor, the novel not only acknowledges the advertising possibilities in female cycling racing, but also comments upon the commercialisation of the New Woman.

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Figure 3.4  ‘“Don’t scorch, miss; don’t scorch”’, in Grant Allen, Miss Cayley’s Adventures (London: Grant Richards, 1899). University of Alberta Libraries.

The accompanying illustrations by Gordon Browne provide another dimension to the text. Lois arrives at the starting point wearing her ‘short serge dress and cycling jacket’ (75). As seen in these pictures, Lois still wears feminine attributes such as a skirt, a corset and a dainty little hat even when competing in the race. Earlier illustrations have depicted Lois on an open-­frame ‘women’s’ bicycle model. These feminine attributes are important: while Lois is a hyperbolic figuration of the New Woman, participating as the sole female competitor in a men’s cycling race, she still retains the ‘gracefulness’ highlighted by cyclists and dress reformers. Several illustrations depict Lois on her bicycle, competing with men. In one of these illustrations we see Hitchcock in the background, on horseback, encouraging Lois as she rides (Figure 3.4). This and other illustrations of Lois alone against all male competitors, on her bicycle, using her physical strength, underlines the complex relationship between gender and technology at the fin de siècle; the processes through which the bicycle as a symbol of emancipation comes to play a crucial part in questioning traditional gender roles. However, while Allen’s earlier New Woman heroine Juliet proudly wears her rational costume, Lois in Browne’s illustrations manages to remain ‘womanly’ by keeping her

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feminine attributes and wearing an improbably long skirt. Illustrations such as these, Gruber Garvey argues, provide ‘visual reassurance’ that women could ride the bicycle with grace and modesty, championing a kind of ‘suitable women’s mode for riding’ (1995: 70). The bicycle’s perceived threat to gender definition is here potentially contained, as the New Woman cyclist is allowed only while remaining specifically sexed. It is important to note the riding posture that Lois keeps in this illustration: an upright, graceful and ‘womanly’ riding position. As Gruber Garvey notes, ‘[t]he whole question of riding astride anything was problematic for women to begin with’, and Victorian girls were prohibited to use toys with straddle seats, which could threaten their sexual innocence (74). With the advent of the safety bicycle and its female ridership, straddling could no longer be avoided, and medical advisers gave much attention to the issue of women straddling and its possible implications. The ‘scorching’ position – that is, the bent-­over-­ the-­handlebars posture adopted by speeders – was generally condemned for women: ‘deviations from upright decorousness and graceful riding are more serious, and bicycle-­ riding posture could be a significant measure of propriety and sexual innocence’ (Gruber Garvey 1995: 75). Any deviation by a woman cyclist from an upright posture might thus suggest ‘unwomanliness’. In this light, Hitchcock’s repeated calling out to Lois not to scorch can be further understood. For his advertising purposes, Hitchcock encourages Lois to ride, but not to scorch during the level riding as do the other cyclists: ‘“Don’t scorch, miss; don’t scorch; never mind ef you lose sight of ’em. Keep your wind; that’s the point”’ (78). Even when she is last among the contestants, and their backers are telling her to give up, Hitchcock again calls out to Lois to do ‘“nothing of the sort, miss! You stick to it, and keep your wind! It’s the wind that wins!”’ (79). While this may at first seem a mere tactical advice from her backer, it can also be read as an instruction to (for commercial purposes) remain in her upright, ‘womanly’ posture. Keeping her wind – that is, saving her breath, saving her energy for later – is what matters. It also, however, means keeping her wind as in riding calmly enough to keep her appearance. The importance of riding posture is further highlighted in a later illustration of the race, when Lois has caught up with the other contestants (Figure 3.5). Here we see Lois next to one of her rivals, the ‘Herr Lieutenant’, known to Lois for insulting her at the starting point. Herr Lieutenant has been leading the race up until now, but Lois outruns him, passing him in a gracefully upright position: ‘He answered not a word, but worked his hardest. So did I. He bent forward: I sat erect on my Manitou, pulling hard at my handles’ (82–3). She rides in an upright

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Figure 3.5  ‘“I am here, behind you, Herr Lieutenant,”’ in Grant Allen, Miss Cayley’s Adventures (London: Grant Richards, 1899). University of Alberta Libraries.

posture while he scorches, bent over his handlebars, as seen in the ­different positions of the handlebars on Lois’s and her rival’s bicycles in the illustration. As Gruber Garvey points out, riding posture could be enforced by the alignment of the bicycle; one could set the handlebars higher for women than men to prevent women from scorching (1995: 76–7). Allen’s New Woman cyclist defeats all her male contestants, but is allowed to do so only when riding gracefully, ‘womanly’. These illustrations, similar to Allen’s continual textual reminders of his heroines’ ‘womanliness’, might be an attempt to domesticate the New Woman’s progressive views to the more conventional readers. Other illustrations include one of Lois hauling herself down a mountain to save Harold (138), another one of her riding a camel (186), and yet another one of her shooting a tiger from the seat of an elephant’s back (245) – all these in skirt and corseted figure. While Simpson draws a direct connection between women’s racing and the New Woman, she points out that the marketing of cycles to more conservative female riders would use conventional images of women that aligned with traditional ideas about female respectability, grace and modesty rather than in the context of racing (2007: 61). As Willis points out, the New Woman must also ‘prove her “womanly” credentials’ in order to be an

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acceptable heroine for popular fiction (2001: 61). While the stories of Lois Cayley have often been read as ‘actually reinforcing traditional ideas of feminine inferiority’ (Craig and Cadogan 1981: 26), scholars have also considered the commercialised New Woman as a progressive figure in the context of popular fiction (Willis 2001: 54, 64; Foxwell 2008: xiii). While Allen’s recourses to the ‘womanliness’ of the New Woman might send ‘mixed messages’ about the relations between the sexes, it is important to note that these are ‘not inconsistent with the period’ (Foxwell 2008: xiii). Allen, like Wells, is more fruitfully read with attention given to the historical context rather than examined solely by twenty-­first-­century conceptions of gender and feminism. Lois not only wins the racing contest but also becomes a commission agent for Hitchcock’s bicycle, touring Switzerland and selling bicycles. Seeing the bad business of trying to sell bicycles in winter, she leaves Switzerland for Florence, where she convinces her friend Elsie to join her in setting up ‘“the Florentine School of Stenography and Typewriting”’ (144). After advertising their new enterprise, the typing agency quickly acquires customers. For the next twelve months, Lois tells the reader, ‘we spent the greater part of the year in Florence, where we were building up a connection, but rode back for the summer months to Switzerland, as being a livelier place for the trade in bicycles’ (170). Before long, Lois starts working as a corresponding journalist for the Daily Telephone, for which she travels around the world producing articles from Cairo, the Nile, Syria and India, but returns to Britain to help clear her admirer Harold from an accusation of forgery. While throughout the stories Lois rejects traditional marriage, afraid to be seen as a fortune-­seeker or adventuress, she does in the end marry Harold. However, she only considers an offer from a man of equal economic and intellectual standing, and one who shares her emancipated views. The question remains whether Miss Cayley’s Adventures constitutes a domestication of the New Woman cyclist, as necessitated by the commercial context, thus defusing the threat that the bicycle seemed to pose to gender definition, or if the novel might still be read as a progressive figuration of early feminism. While the use of the bicycle and physical exercise might threaten to ‘unsex’ women, the notion of the specifically sexed (or ‘womanly’) cyclist complicates the reading of the bicycle as an inherently progressive technology: Lois still remains ‘womanly’, riding in skirts in an upright graceful position. However, considering the commercialisation of the New Woman cyclist solely as a containment of the emancipatory ideas linked to the bicycle might prove too superficial a reading. While adhering to the image of the specifically sexed cyclist of advertising, the novel itself comments upon the commercialisation of

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the bicycle business. Lois continually questions Hitchcock’s advertising plans and ridicules his insistence that ‘“the world to-­day is governed by advertizement”’ (75). When Lois is hired as commission agent, she is – ‘as a consistent socialist’ (90) – at first abhorred at the prospect of taking 25 per cent as a middlewoman. As Hitchcock tells Lois: ‘“Advertizement, miss, may be the soul of commerce, but Commission’s its body”’ (89). However, Lois soon learns to employ Hitchcock’s commercial language for her own and others’ purposes. To obtain a bicycle for her friend Elsie, Lois writes to the American stating that ‘two Manitous would surely be better than one as an advertizement’. The inventor immediately sends her another machine, thanking her for her ‘brilliant suggestion’ and praising her ‘way of doing business’ (100–1). Imitating Hitchcock’s ways, she explains to Elsie: ‘“Why, certainly, my dear,” I answered, as if I always expected to find bicycles showered upon me. “It’s a mutual arrangement. Benefits him; benefits you. Reciprocity is the groundwork of business. He gets the advertisement; you get the amusement”’ (101). Similarly, when establishing the Florentine typewriting office, Lois obtains the typewriter machines gratis by using Hitchcock’s business contacts. When Lois returns to Britain, the notion of the world being ‘governed to-­day by advertizement’ is made explicit. After several months’ absence, Lois is shocked by the colourful advertisement all over London: ‘the polychromatic decorations of our English streets, looming up through the smoke, seemed both strange and familiar’ (259). She drives through the city ‘with a vague consciousness that Lipton’s tea is the perfection of cocoa and matchless for the complexion, but that it dyes all colours, and won’t wash clothes’ (259). Furthermore, when working as a corresponding journalist, Lois satirises the sensational ‘new journalism’ of the late nineteenth century: ‘An unvisited oasis – and two Christian ladies to be the first to explore it: there’s journalistic enterprise for you! If we happened to be killed, so much the better for the Daily Telephone. I pictured the excitement at Piccadilly Circus. “Extra Special, Our Own Correspondent brutally murdered!”’ (183). The novel might thus be read as commenting not only upon the commercialisation of the New Woman, but also upon its own place in a literary market ruled by advertisement. As noted in this chapter, technologies such as the bicycle and rational dress are not in themselves inherently progressive, but their emancipatory potential depends upon how they are configured both in literary and other contexts. The ‘modern’ and emancipatory potential of technologies such as the bicycle depends upon how they are employed within daily social practice or invested with symbolic meaning. Through

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periodical and literary figurations of the New Woman cyclist, the bicycle is employed as an emblem of democratisation and women’s rights, binding together concrete physical mobility and abstract visions of female emancipation. By exposing the processes through which the bicycle is given a wider significance and comes to be the New Woman’s primary symbol of emancipation, Wells’s The Wheels of Chance and Allen’s Miss Cayley’s Adventures complicate the notion of the bicycle as a ‘freedom machine’. In The Wheels of Chance, Jessie finally returns to her family, and, in Miss Cayley’s Adventures, Lois does indeed marry happily in the end. As Willis states, notwithstanding these ‘conventional’ endings, such New Woman heroines of popular or commercial fiction ‘possibly did as much for women’s rights as did the more serious fiction produced by the campaigners’ (2001: 54). ‘By marketing the New Woman for mass consumption’, Willis declares, ‘the writers of commercial fiction ensured her a prominent and lasting place in popular culture’ (2001: 64). While Wells’s figuration of the New Woman cyclist insists on the class specifics of the New Woman, Allen’s novel comments upon the growing commercial interests within the late Victorian literary market. The two novels thus thematise different aspects of the ‘bicycle craze’ of the mid-­1890s and serve to complicate any one-­sided reading of the New Woman cyclist as either defusing or highlighting the gender politics that the figuration envisioned.

Notes 1. A clear instance of the link between radical politics and cycling in the 1890s can be seen in the formation of the Clarion Cycling Club. The first branch was formed in Birmingham in 1894 and took its name from Robert Blatchford’s socialist newspaper. A year later it was established as the National Clarion Cycling Club. The Club quickly grew, with sections across the UK, bringing together working-­ class people on cycling tours in the countryside. Often these tours involved spreading the Clarion newspaper, which soon included a cycling column and featured cycling advertisements (Rubinstein 1977: 68–70). The Club sported some well-­known sympathisers such as the suffragettes Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst. 2. Rubinstein estimates that London had about 300 cycling clubs in 1898 (1977: 50). The 1896 film short ‘Hyde Park Bicycling Scene’ (Paul 2006) by early filmmaker Robert W. Paul depicts what appears to be Hyde Park’s main north–south road crowded with bicyclists swishing by the camera – at least half of them are female cyclists. The film shows how this new transport and pastime, and perhaps the perceived spectacle of women cyclists, fascinated both early filmmakers and early audiences. There are several

100    Gender, Technology and the New Woman ­ icycle-­themed film shorts produced in Britain during this time by leading b early film pioneers, many films also specifically figuring female cyclists. 3. The object of the Society is stated in every issue of their Gazette, which was published quarterly between April 1888 and July 1889: ‘to promote the adoption, according to individual taste and convenience, of a style of dress based upon considerations of health, comfort, and beauty, and to deprecate constant changes of fashion that cannot be recommended on any of these grounds’ (Rational Dress Society’s Gazette 1 (April 1888): 1). 4. Implicit in Felski’s, Parkins’s, and Gordon’s argument are Foucauldian readings of power and discourse not as suprastructural, but as ‘rooted deep in the social nexus’ (Foucault 2002: 343), through the people enacting these power relations. As noted in Chapter 1, a Foucauldian account of power relations as mobile, and discourse as something that can be reworked as well as reinforced, allows a potential for change. Counteracting arguments for technological determinism, such an understanding enables a reading of the New Woman cyclist as a proto-­and early feminist figure. 5. Stubbs argues that there are ‘so many limitations to Wells’s feminism . . . that one has to ask, was he really a feminist at all?’ (1979: 193), while Sylvia Hardy considers that Wells ‘cannot be seen as a feminist’ (1997: 61). 6. Wells frequently employs the bicycle as a metaphor for social relations and technological progress. In War of the Worlds (1898) there are heaps of bicycles on the side of the road after the Martians begin their attacks, possibly as a symbol of the destruction of civilisation. In A Modern Utopia (1905) Wells famously writes regarding freedom of movement in Utopia that ‘[c]ycle tracks will abound in Utopia, sometimes following beside the great high roads, but oftener taking their own more agreeable line amidst woods and crops and pastures; and there will be a rich variety of footpaths and minor ways’ (1905: 47). 7. Bicycle models were early on differentiated by gender. The diamond-­shaped frame (similar to present-­day men’s bicycles) was presented as standard, and the drop frame (or open frame) that allows riding in a skirt became the women’s version (Gruber Garvey 1995: 69). Whereas many female cyclists might choose to use the ‘women’s’ model, female racers used ‘male’ or diamond-­framed bicycle models, since these were structurally stronger and thus the most efficient and durable for racing purposes.

Chapter 4

Medical New Women I: Nurses

Late nineteenth-­ century technological modernity involved not only new communications and transport technologies, as seen in previous chapters, but also medical ones. Through engagements with various new material technologies and systems of knowledge, gender configurations of the time were negotiated also within the medical field. Notably, the late nineteenth century saw the emergence of female doctors and of modern nursing. When nursing in the late nineteenth century entered the key medical institution of the hospital, the figure of the modern or ‘New Style’ Nightingale nurse took form. This entrance into the previously male-­ dominated grounds of science and technology was, however, not easily made. Florence Nightingale in Notes on Nursing (1859) underlines the novelty of medical knowledge being obtained – and questioned – by women: ‘It is constantly objected, – “But how can I obtain this medical knowledge? I am not a doctor. I must leave this to doctors”’ (1980: 3). A long-­lasting debate started regarding the nature of nursing and what counts as authoritative knowledge, involving a discussion on the relation between (male) doctors and (female) nurses within the hospital. This was a gender complication which, as Arlene Young states, ‘would continue to influence relations between doctors and nurses and to shape the public debate over nursing for two decades’ (2008: 20). Debates on the ‘nursing question’ carried on for the remainder of the century, with the figure of the New Style nurse continually constructed and contested in the struggle for definitions and roles in the hospital institution. Importantly, these questions regarding hospital hierarchies and gendered knowledge were disputed not only in medical journals but also in public discourse and literary works. This chapter examines literary figurations of the New Style nurse alongside accounts from nursing journals such as The Nursing Record, as interjections in the late nineteenth-­century debates regarding the roles

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and relations of nurses and doctors. In literature of the fin de siècle the threatening disobedience of the New Style nurse is embodied in the New Woman nurse, who through her use of modern medical technologies becomes a potentially transgressive character. Through a reading of Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade (1900), in which the independent nurse Hilda challenges male medical authority, the chapter explores the institutional technology of the hospital and its gendering of knowledge. While the clinical hospital enables a certain agency on behalf of the modern nurse, this agency is restricted, as the same institution also reinforces gendered hierarchies of knowledge.

Modern Nursing and the New Style Nurse The emergence of modern nursing, or indeed the transformation of nursing, is pictured in William Ernest Henley’s 1877 collection In Hospital. In the two poems ‘Staff-­Nurse: Old Style’ (1901: 13) and ‘Staff-­Nurse: New Style’ (1901: 15), he describes his meeting with two kinds of staff nurses. The Old Style nurse is an elderly figure characterised by an ‘experienced ease’: And antique liveliness and ponderous grace; The sweet old roses of her sunken face; The depth and malice of her sly, grey eyes

She has been ‘[t]hese thirty years’ nursing there, and is held dear by both patients and students. She builds her occupation on ‘experience’ rather than education, and evidently comes from a different class background. The New Style hospital-­trained nurse, on the other hand, is painted as a handsome young woman ‘bright of face’: Superbly falls her gown of sober gray, And on her chignon’s elegant array The plainest cap is somehow touched with caste.

This modern nurse is not only educated in both music and literature, but she is also equipped with extensive knowledge of languages and modern medical technologies: Speaks Latin with a right accentuation; And gives at need (as one who understands) Draught, counsel, diagnosis, exhortation.

In these two poems we see the change from, or the perceived opposition between, the Old Style nurse (rather benign and maternal in Henley’s

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characterisation) relying on experience, to the Nightingale New Style nurse with up-­to-­date medical knowledge and technical skills. The stereotypical image of the Old Style nurse, created as a ‘slovenly, drunken battle-­axe – Dickens’s Sairey Gamp and Betsy Prig’ (Porter 2003: 145), was overtaken during the latter half of the nineteenth century by the well-­read New Style nurse in control of modern medical knowledge and technologies. While the Old Style nurse is characterised as ‘aged, corpulent, slovenly and unconscious due to alcohol’, the New Style nurse ideal, of whom Florence Nightingale was the famous champion, is distinguished by her ‘erect, vigilant managerial competence and dedication to her patients’ (Judd 1998: 6). While there were many agents and events in this transformation, a significant one was Nightingale’s restructuring of hospital planning in the Crimean War (1853–6), together with the construction of the New Style nurse in public discourse via a long series of ‘nursing debates’ from the 1880s onwards, which formulated Nightingale’s legacy.1 Scholars have noted the ‘close connection between the creation of the nursing profession and the birth of the modern hospital’ (Judd 1998: 38), highlighting that it was ‘through the establishment of hospital-­based training programmes that the professionalization of nursing was ultimately achieved’ (Summers 1989: 366­–7).2 The emergence of modern nursing is intertwined with the move of nursing training into the hospital; that is, the birth of the clinical hospital is a condition for New Style nursing taking on its modern significance. Nightingale played a large part in relocating nursing into the hospital, and in creating the image of the New Style nurse. As a result of the public enthusiasm over her mission in the Crimea, Nightingale has been ‘almost universally accepted as the prime mover in shaping the public perception of nursing, either as the agent of its redefinition or as the quasi-­mythic figure embodying the modern ideal’ (Young 2008: 19). Nightingale throughout her career published various books on nursing, in which she often emphasised the specifically ‘womanly’ nature of nursing. In the preface to her most famous work, Notes on Nursing: What it is, and What it is Not (1859), which sold 15,000 copies in just one month, Nightingale claims nursing as an essentially feminine profession: ‘Every woman or at least almost every woman, in England has, at one time or another of her life, charge of the personal health of somebody, whether child or invalid – in other words, every woman is a nurse.’ Nursing, she states, is recognised as ‘the knowledge which every one ought to have – distinct from medical knowledge, which only a profession can have’ (1980: v). Nursing is here considered as a feminine occupation and the care involved is considered fitting to a ‘natural’ womanliness. Indeed,

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Nightingale asks elsewhere: ‘Can any woman wish for a more womanly work?’ (1954: 396). Because of this supposedly inherent ‘womanliness’ of the occupation, she resisted later calls for professionalisation in terms of statutory registration for nurses. The stereotypical image of feminine domesticity constructed by Nightingale in the New Style nurse figure disguised the more emancipated ideas associated with working women. As Mary Poovey states, through reproducing the separation of spheres also within the hospital, modern nursing ‘proudly claimed a supportive, subordinate relationship to its male counterpart’ (1989: 166). This self-­proclaimed subordination, Poovey notes, ‘helped enhance the reputation of an activity overwhelmingly dominated by women, because it helped neutralize the specter of female sexuality contemporaries associated with independent women’ (166). Nightingale’s domestic rhetoric becomes a way of masking the radical aspects of nursing, making the nurses’ move into hospitals acceptable for the public as well as for medical men. In so doing, as Poovey notes, this representation of nursing ‘helped preserve the domestic ideal it seemed to undermine’ (165). One way of negotiating late nineteenth-­ century ideas regarding gendered occupations is exactly by emphasising the particular ‘womanly’ aspects of the charge. With the success of the figure of the ‘lady with the lamp’, the first Nightingale nursing school started in 1860 in collaboration with St Thomas’s Hospital in London; thus nursing education and training was taken into the hospitals (Porter 2003: 145–7).3 With clinical training the number of nurses grew substantially: before 1861 there were said to be less than a thousand nurses in hospitals, by the end of the century there were some 12,500, and in 1905 there were 11,038 nurses in voluntary hospitals and circa 5,000 in poor law institutions (Lane 2001: 130). Reporting from a great 1896 London nursing exhibition, medical journal The Lancet notes that ‘[n]ursing as a profession is growing every year, and appliances for the care and comfort of the sick are daily increasing’ (‘A Nursing Exhibition’ 1896: 1589). In this exhibition ‘the latest and most approved appliances’ were put on display, hoping to prove ‘of great educational value to the nurse as well as to the general public’ (1589). The two-­week-­long exhibition with its intended wide audience demonstrates that nursing was of interest not only to the medical profession, but also to the public. The concept of the modern or New Style nurse emerged, as a cultural stereotype, within and through a transformation of nursing that was intertwined with the new medical technologies and scientific discoveries of the time. Monica Baly describes this transformation, which resulted in nursing obtaining the status of a legitimate skill and knowledge:

Medical New Women I: Nurses    105 For the first time in history people began to see medicine as scientific, and therefore the new image of the hospital nurse was associated with doctors, science and cure . . . [the nurse] often taking over duties and techniques, and sometimes acquiring knowledge and skill once considered the prerogative of other professions and callings. (1995: 124)

The emergence of modern nursing indeed relies on the obtaining and claiming of medical knowledge. In the 1882 text ‘Nursing the Sick’, Nightingale notes the necessity of nurses having the latest knowledge and techniques: ‘Nursing is, above all, a progressive calling. Year by year nurses have to learn new and improved methods, as medicine and surgery and hygiene improve’ (1954: 349). This is also seen in The Nursing Record, which started in 1888 as ‘a journal for nurses, written by nurses’ (1888: 1) and became the official magazine for nursing in Britain, running until 1956 (from 1902 under the name The British Journal of Nursing). In the 1894 article ‘The Nursing Profession’, the transformation of nursing is described as springing from the hospital-­based education of nurses: contrary to the ‘old idea that a Nurse, like a poet, was born, not made’, it is now recognised that a nurse must possess both certain necessary qualities (such as health and good temper) and a ‘careful education in technical subjects’ (1894: 214). Modern medical technology, or training in ‘technical subjects’, is essential to New Style nursing.4 There were several publications for nurses providing information on technical subjects. The nursing handbook Norris’s Nursing Notes (1891) not only gives an account of human anatomy and pathology but also explains the day-­to-­day business of nursing. In the chapter on operations, Rachel Norris lists all kinds of medical technologies needed, which the nurse usually collects: ‘basins, sand-­bowl, bleeding cups (or “porringers,” as they are called), strapping can, syringes, a bit of elastic tubing, stethoscope, feeder, teaspoon, plenty of towels, . . . not forgetting thimble, scissors and needle, thread, and safety pins’, and so on (1891: 38). In the section describing ward duties, lists of necessary technologies and techniques are set out; among others are cupping, fomentation, enemata, bandages, poultices, hypodermic injections, splints, disinfectants (140–51). Norris points out that ‘the special and technical part of a Nurse’s training can only be acquired by actual Hospital experience’ (5), but that beforehand knowledge of technical terms and anatomy will help. The crucial bond between modern medical science and technologies, and the transformation of nursing, is acknowledged also in the mainstream press. In June 1880, Seymour J. Sharkey (a doctor at St Thomas’s Hospital) states in the Nineteenth Century that ‘[t]he development, if not the origin, of the art of nursing is mainly a result of the progress of

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medical knowledge’ (1880: 1097). Similarly, in July 1893 Gertrude Dix remarks in the Westminster Review: The progress of medical and surgical science has been followed, step by step, by a corresponding advance in skilled nursing, and the character of a nurse’s duties has completely changed. . . . From having been considered a work any woman was capable of performing – a something ‘that came by nature,’ nursing is now a recognised profession, requiring a system of theoretical and practical training extending over a definite period. (1893: 627–8)

The nurse’s scientific knowledge and technical skills, and her move into the previously male sphere of the clinical hospital, can thus be seen as legitimating nursing as a valid field of knowledge, as giving nurses authority. By the 1880s nursing had moved into hospital settings and the new nurse leaders were starting to demand statutory registration of nursing, although this did not come about until the first few years of the twentieth century (Baly 1995: 145–9). The call for professionalisation sparked a long-­lasting debate regarding the nature of nursing, and regarding gendered relations between doctors and nurses. These debates came to pinpoint questions or anxieties regarding gender, technology and knowledge at the fin de siècle, embodied in the figure of the New Style nurse and her place within the hospital institution. Young explains the extent to which the public took part in these debates: Nursing was everyone’s question. It was a contested field of endeavour that sparked debate not only in medical journals, such as the Lancet, but also in the pages of mainstream British newspapers and periodicals. The protracted public discourse over nursing spanned the mid-­to late-­Victorian period, encompassed issues of class and gender, as well as of hospital organisation and patient care, and played an important role in the evolution of the nursing profession. (2008: 18)

While the debates before the 1880s had been well-­meaning and in general appreciative of the modern nurse, the professionalisation of nursing evoked criticism from many medical men. In a series of publicised crises in the 1870s and 1880s in large London hospitals the ‘nursing question’ became a matter of public debate, forming a backdrop and context to figurations of the New Style and the later literary New Woman nurse. The publicised conflicts included both attacks on and defences of New Style nursing. Underlying the doctors’ public protests, Young suggests, was the fear of professional displacement (2008: 31). The British Medical Journal provides an instance of this fear in April 1880, stating that doctors ‘ought to be the controllers, not controlled’ (‘The Nursing at Guy’s Hospital’ 1880: 526). Still towards the end of the century the

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debates were heated, with the British Medical Journal publishing pieces such as ‘Doctor or Nurse? – the New Danger’ (27 June 1896) and the critical ‘Nurses à la Mode’ (30 January 1897). In an exchange of letters published as ‘The Irrepressible Nurse’, ‘Dr H.’ in the same journal contends that ‘it is a new phase of medical practice which makes the “doctor” subsidiary to the “nurse”’ (1898: 51). There are recurring notices in the British Medical Journal of nurses having made mistakes, typically because of taking on a doctor’s role. An 1880 issue reports the death of a patient who had his scalp-­wound dressed by a nurse instead of by a doctor. This incident, the journal states, comes of ‘the system by which the nursing . . . has been made to supersede and override the responsibility of the medical staff, instead of being its docile and skilled instrument’ (‘Guy’s Hospital’ 1880: 713). A similar scolding can be seen in the report entitled ‘Poisoning by Misadventure: A Nurse’s Fatal Mistake’ (13 January 1894). However, the conflicts between medical and nursing staff were not uniformly confrontational; nurses repeatedly stated that they did not aspire to be doctors, and several medical men wrote in defence of modern nursing. When Walter Besant claims in April 1883 in the Gentleman’s Magazine that the first duty of a nurse is ‘blind obedience to the doctor’s orders’ and that it is ‘by no means desirable that nurses should be themselves students of medicine’ (1883: 364), the British Medical Journal two months later reports of a lecture by the surgeon Frederick Churchill, who ‘took exception to the doctrines recently advanced’ by Besant. The report states: ‘A nurse is not a doctor, and the doctor demands, not blind obedience, but an intelligent, watchful, seeing, though implicit obedience’ (‘Lectures to Nurses’ 1883: 1239). Additionally, there are several supporting letters from medical men speaking for the statutory registration of nurses. The debates on the ‘nursing question’ carried on for the remainder of the century, with the figure of the New Style nurse being continually contested in this struggle for definitions and roles in the hospital institution. The late nineteenth century in this way witnessed a discursive battle regarding hospital hierarchies, that is, the roles of and relationship between doctors and nurses, and regarding what constitutes medical knowledge and who is entitled to claim it.

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Medical Modernity: Institutional Technology and Diagnostic Tools The clinical hospital works as an enabling context for the New Style nurse, as nurses did not gain authority until they entered this institution. As the organisation of medical training in the hospital had given medicine the status of science, so, too, the organisation of a system of nursing training within the clinical hospital in the latter half of the nineteenth century helped legitimate nursing as a field of knowledge and skill of its own. The anonymous author of ‘Memories’ by A Hospital Nurse (1910) refers to the hospital as a ‘mighty machine’ (1910: 17), and indeed the modern clinical hospital itself is a kind of technology: a machine that – through medical examinations and modern diagnostic tools – orders, sorts, diagnoses, produces and also genders knowledge. The hospital as a medical institution is a fairly recent phenomenon. While pre-­modern hospitals provided treatment, food and shelter for the sick and needy, these hospitals were not (with rare exceptions) centres of advanced medicine. They were rather more like hospices providing refuge and care, and were generally religious (Dingwall et al. 1988: 19–21). This disparity can be noticed in Nightingale’s prefatory words in her 1863 edition of Notes on Hospitals, where she states that the duty of the hospital is to make people well rather than ill: It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a Hospital that it should do no harm. It is quite necessary, nevertheless, to lay down such a principle, because the actual mortality in hospitals . . . is very much higher than any calculation founded on the mortality of the same class of diseases among patients treated out of hospital would lead us to expect. (1863: iii)

The medical take-­over of hospitals in Western Europe took place at the end of the eighteenth century, as hospitals were opened to medical students when professors with access to clinical beds started using instructive cases as teaching material. The hospital was thus transformed into a clinic; a teaching hospital with advanced medicine. Whereas pre-­modern hospitals were merely to house the inmates or patients, the modern clinical hospitals were to cure them. Medicine was established as science, shifting from an abstract intellectual system based on religion to one based upon a scientific model of research. Following this shift, the clinical hospital gained authority, and association with a hospital became a source of professional leverage for doctors. The birth of the clinic involved a change not only in the medical

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profession but in the production of knowledge, as producing and legitimating medical knowledge became dependent upon an idea of scientificity (which later becomes essential in the context of modern nursing). As Foucault notes, changes in knowledge ‘are not simply new discoveries; there is a whole new “régime” in discourse and forms of knowledge’ (1980a: 112). This means that truth (or what is considered as knowledge) is not to be understood as a universal fact or value, but as a historically situated ‘system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements . . . linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it’ (1980a: 133). In other words, knowledge is produced and legitimated in relation to power; what counts as knowledge or truth at a certain time is inextricably linked with current power relations, including gendered relations. The clinical hospital and the new anatomo-­clinical medicine, involving new medical approaches based on physical examination, pathological anatomy and statistics, established such a new ‘régime’ in which the institutional technology of the hospital came to produce knowledge and scientificity. In its modern clinical guise the hospital functions not only as a machine for curing, but also as a machine that produces knowledge. The production of knowledge is bound up with current power relations, which – although mobile – can also be examined in the context of larger institutions and disciplines such as the clinical hospital and anatomo-­clinical medicine. While power, as Foucault states, ‘exists only as exercised by some on others, only when it is put into action’, it is also ‘inscribed in a field of sparse available possibilities underpinned by permanent structures’ (2002: 340). While there is no such entity as power, in a knowledge-­producing institution such as the hospital any negotiation of power relations is still ‘underpinned by permanent structures’ and hierarchies. Analysing institutions such as the hospital from the standpoint of power relations means focusing on relations between individuals or groups: ‘if we speak of the power of laws, institutions, and ideologies, if we speak of structures or mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others. The term “power” designates relationships between “partners”’ (Foucault 2002: 337). Because of the mobile character of power relations, there is still a potential for change within a hierarchical institution such as the hospital. Material and institutional technologies do not merely inscribe people but are also impacted upon by individuals and groups, through the ‘technologies of self-­ formation’ or practices whereby individuals make themselves and are made into selves (Foucault 2000: 225). The

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doctor–nurse relationship becomes one formulation of such negotiation of hierarchies. While the clinical hospital itself functions as a technology for producing knowledge, medical modernity is correspondingly formed through new inventions and technologies. The emergence of anatomo-­clinical medicine involved a changing perception which is usually described as the invention of a medical ‘gaze’ (Foucault 2007). This new anatomo-­ clinical perception or medical gaze – the gaze of scientificity and of legitimation by science – involved a reorganisation of knowledge. The focus shifted to the visible, scientific and measurable, and the physician no longer formed his (or later, her) knowledge through imagining but by the act of seeing, observing, by his ‘positive gaze’. Based on physical examination, anatomo-­clinical medicine evolved in relation to new diagnostic devices such as the stethoscope (1816), the ophthalmoscope and the laryngoscope (mid-­Victorian), the hypodermic syringe (1853), the thermometer and fever charts (1860s), the sphygmograph (mid-­ Victorian) and later sphygmomanometer (1880s), and the X-­ray (1895). These ‘sense-­extending implements’ (Sandelowski 2000: 92) made it possible to measure, monitor, analyse and record body functions in a positivist scientific manner, enabling the production of knowledge by physical examination. The medical gaze is embodied in the ability to make a medical diagnosis, something which was and still is reserved for doctors. This ‘allegedly scientifically determined’ gendered division of labour within the hospital could be seen as one of the main manifestations of the patriarchal nature of the two sets of relations: nurse–doctor and female– male (Gamarnikow 1978: 109). Diagnosis became a critical component of the doctor’s hegemony within medicine – even the nurse’s access to patients depended on prior (male) medical intervention through diagnosis (Gamarnikow 1978: 120). By help of diagnostic tools the doctors could carry through their physical examinations and make diagnoses. As Margarete Sandelowski notes, these new technologies were instrumental in ‘both reinforcing the rhetorical and subverting the actual division between nursing and doctoring’ (2000: 96). Although nurses shared many new diagnostic devices with physicians, they had different relations to them: while the nurses gained new knowledge, they did not gain the prestige that using the technologies might involve. The privilege of medical knowledge was reserved for the doctors: ‘Indeed, physicians derived much of their cultural authority from their association with a technology that was seen to embody science’ (Sandelowski 2000: 92). Similarly, the clinical gaze, through which the physician was to detect disease, was not the gaze of the nurse. The nurse’s main duty was instead

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observation. Nightingale in Notes on Nursing states that ‘[t]he most important practical lesson that can be given to nurses is to teach them what to observe – how to observe – what symptoms indicate improvement – what the reverse – which are of importance – which are of none – which are the evidence of neglect – and of what kind of neglect’ (1980: 88). In the nurse’s calling, Nightingale states, observation is ‘essential’; without it nurses would be ‘useless’ (94). While observation was one of the nurse’s main duties, she was not authorised to give a diagnosis. The hierarchical organisation of the hospital is upheld by the exclusivity of doctors to make diagnoses, and their use of medical technologies to that end. Medical modernity can thus be observed both in the knowledge-­ producing institutional technology of the hospital and in the specific diagnostic devices that help form the positivist medical ‘gaze’. While modern nursing emerges as it moves into the hospital and by this gains status as a legitimate field of knowledge, this nursing knowledge is however gendered and limited: the clinical hospital not only gains authority as scientific, but also produces hierarchical patterns in which knowledge is gendered and valued differently. As seen in professional nursing texts, the nurse–doctor relationship is however not wholly fixed, but can be negotiated. Henley in his poem claims that the New Style nurse gives ‘Draught, counsel, diagnosis, exhortation’ – despite her main occupation as feminine observer. In addition to the nurse–doctor relationship, the nurse–patient relationship, too, opens up for new configurations of power. The nurse is placed in a situation where she is in control and able to give or withhold her attentions to the patient as she pleases. New Style nursing might thus be considered as a way of negotiating the strict hierarchical organisation of the hospital, allowing the nurse a degree of authority. The technology at work in the emergence of modern or New Style nursing is not just the institutional technology of the hospital but also technologies of self-­formation through which the (female) nurse can question the (male) doctor. At the end of the nineteenth century, these issues were being fought out not only in medical journals but in public discourse and in literary works.

The New Woman Nurse in Fiction While doctors are frequent in literature of the Victorian fin de siècle, hospital-­ trained New Style or later New Woman nurses are not as common.5 Modern nurses in literature of the time include Edward Berdoe’s St. Bernard’s, or, The Romance of a Medical Student (1887),

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which features a romance between a research-­focused doctor and a New Style nurse; Mary Augusta Ward’s Marcella (1894), in which the New Woman Marcella, among other trades, pursues a career in nursing; and L. T. Meade’s A Sister of the Red Cross (1901), a romantic story in which the main character works as a nurse in the Boer War. New Woman novels with a nurse figuring include Margaret Harkness’s A City Girl (1887), Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman (1894) and Florence Marryat’s An Angel of Pity (1898). These texts provide an indication of the complex interrelation between gender and technology in the figure of the New Style nurse, and of the role of hospital in constructing this image. Literary figurations of nurses play a crucial role in the public discussions surrounding the transformation of nursing. This is seen in the conflicting literary images of Old Style and New Style nurses, in works such as L. T. Meade’s Stories from the Diary of a Doctor (two series, 1894–6), which, although focusing on the male Doctor Halifax’s work, also presents images of nurses. In ‘The Wrong Prescription’, an incompetent Old Style family nurse supplies her mistress with deadly doses of morphine despite the doctor’s orders. Suspicious of the nurse’s qualifications, Doctor Halifax searches the hospital books for her name. As it turns out, the nurse had been dismissed from her education at Guy’s Hospital after only one year in training. Upon learning this, the doctor exclaims: ‘“Then . . . the woman is not even a medical nurse. If she is still with that poor girl, her wretched victim may be dead before we can rescue her”’ (1895: 164). At the end of the story the nurse further endangers her patient’s life by giving her the wrong prescription. The text characterises the Old Style nurse as lacking sufficient clinical training, and unaware of the risks of administering drugs, thus providing a warning of the damage that an Old Style nurse without clinical training might do. A New Style nurse figures in the Doctor Halifax story ‘The Ponsonby Diamonds’ as the ‘strong-­minded and brave girl’ Beryl Temple who wants above all to be trained as a hospital nurse (1895: 339). Once her hospital training is completed she is placed on the doctor’s own staff of nurses, where she by her professional skills helps Doctor Halifax solve the case of a patient. In these two stories, it is only through the hospital institution that a nurse can gain legitimation of her knowledge and skills. Rather than nursing being figured as a naturally ‘womanly’ calling, proper nursing is here qualified by its association with the clinical hospital. The clinical hospital and the nurse’s ‘womanly’ character come together in Harkness’s A City Girl (1887) and Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman (1894). Nelly, the unmarried working woman of A City Girl, takes her sick child to a grubby chemist’s shop

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in the East End, before going to the West End women’s and children’s hospital. In the former location ‘the sun beat through a closed window, and a hundred flies buzzed about, lean-­looking creatures that fed on pills and powders and lived among surgical instruments’ (1887: 147). The clinical hospital, on the other hand, is an environment of cleanliness and comfort. Here, modern medical technologies and the perceived specific femininity of nursing blend together: Everything in the room was perfect. The walls were ornamented with all sorts of devices, the doors had painted panels, the tables were covered with flowers, the floor was stained to match the doors and windows. Nurses tripped in and out, wearing dainty dresses, roses at their throats, and steel instruments at their waists. (158)

Coupling roses and steel instruments, a nurse’s duty is not only to help cure the patients, but also to see to it that the patients’ rooms are pleasant. Nightingale in Notes on Nursing even gives prescriptions for how to walk and dress in order not to disturb the patients. While the scientificity of the clinic – reinforced here by the perfection and cleanliness as well as the medical instruments – legitimates nursing as a proper occupation, there seems to be a specifically feminine behaviour required: nurses ‘trip’ in and out wearing ‘dainty dresses’. This supposedly feminine spreading of well-­ being is seen also in The Story of a Modern Woman. At a visit to the hospital, the ‘modern woman’ Mary and her friend Alison notice the nurses, who are concomitantly described as ‘sexless’ and as spreading well-­being: At intervals down the long room, with its shining white boards, blazed large fires, lighting up, here and there, the bland, unemotional features of a nurse, under her smooth hair and white cap – the sexless features of a woman who has learnt to witness suffering without a sign. Yet they brightened the room, these girls, in their lilac cotton gowns and ample aprons, with their practical faces, and their strong, helpful hands, suggesting an out-­of-­doors where people were healthy and happy, a place where no one was agonising. (1990: 188–9)

However, despite this specifically feminine quality of hospital nurses, the mothers in both novels distrust them, questioning not only Nightingale’s assertion that ‘every woman is a nurse’ but also the competence of hospital nurses. Nelly in A City Girl cannot entrust her baby to a nurse unless that nurse is a mother, saying that ‘“it’s cruel and wicked to let women nurse children that never had them”’ (165). When the baby dies in hospital, Nelly swears ‘the most terrible oaths against childless wives and unmarried women who dared to call themselves nurses’ (169). Alison’s mother in The Story of a Modern Woman similarly refuses to

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hire a hospital nurse when her daughter falls ill: ‘“I will not, while I have health and strength,” said Lady Jane severely at the breakfast table, when the question of a trained nurse was mooted, “consent to have my child nursed by a hireling. It is a mother’s duty”’ (220). In these texts, Old Style nursing in the home is preferred by the two mothers, who do not trust New Style hospital nurses to be caring or motherly enough. These nurses wearing ‘dainty dresses’ and carrying ‘steel instruments’ somehow do not seem ‘womanly’ enough. Marryat’s An Angel of Pity (1898) takes part in the late nineteenth-­ century debate regarding the relation between doctors and nurses in the hospital, while also interjecting in the contemporary discussion on vivisection.6 Most of the novel takes place in the hospital where the main character Nurse Gordon works among hospital nurses (‘all dressed alike, in the regulated costume’) who present the Nightingale ideal: ‘They were a set of fresh, healthy, intelligent young women, aged from five-­and-­twenty to five-­and-­thirty’ (1898: 7). Nurse Gordon, Girton-­educated and with a medical degree from Edinburgh, however, gets into trouble when questioning the established hospital hierarchies. When Nurse Gordon objects to the famous surgeon Dr Lesquard cruelly operating on dying patients, just for the sake of experimenting, the Matron corrects her: ‘“I can’t have any remarks of that kind made here! The visiting surgeons of the hospital know their own business best, and the nurses have nothing to do but to obey their orders. . . . Yes, yes, of course the doctors know best”’ (9, 14). The machinery of the hospital, as well as offering the modern nurse an active position within medical modernity, produces hierarchies of knowledge: the nurse must ‘obey’ the doctor who ‘know[s] best’. Another doctor also disciplines the nurse: ‘“Hush! hush!” exclaimed Doctor Marshall, “you are forgetting yourself, Nurse. Remember, all you have to do is to obey”’ (19). The cruel surgeon demands her dismissal, declaring that ‘“[w]omen have no business in the profession at all! As nurses, they are useful enough; but for nurses we don’t require these very highly-­educated young ladies”’ (21). These words of the famous surgeon display an anxiety regarding the unstable hierarchical system. Surprisingly, before long Dr Lesquard proposes to Nurse Gordon, tempting her with promises of setting up a nursing home. She initially objects, stating to be instead ‘“in love with [her] profession, and want no other lover in return”’ (135). However, even more surprisingly, Nurse Gordon later accepts the offer. The promised nursing home does not come into being, and the marriage is unhappy; the doctor is annoyed by his wife’s insistence on continuing her work as a nurse, and by her disobedience in the home. When Nurse Gordon discovers that

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Dr Lesquard is a vivisectionist – she catches him in the act of dissecting her own dog – she finally leaves him, after throwing a surgical knife at him in rage. When she finds out that his knife-­wound has become infected, Nurse Gordon returns to nurse her husband back to health, and promises to stay with him on the condition that he abandons vivisection. An Angel of Pity thus manages to critique medical authority and vivisection, from a nurse’s perspective, by pointing out the inhumanities that can exist in a hospital. Marryat highlights the gender specifics of hospital hierarchies by emphasising the parallel labour division and struggles in the clinic and in the home. At the hospital Dr Lesquard experiments on living patients, while at home he experiments on living animals. At the hospital there are gendered hierarchies between doctor and nurse, just as there are parallel power structures between husband and wife in the home. While nurses in these texts wear ‘dainty dresses’ and seem to spread a specifically feminine well-­being, they are at the same time involved with and in control of authoritative knowledge, enabled by the clinical setting. In the ongoing debate regarding nurses, doctors and hospital hierarchies, nursing knowledge might indeed have to be coded in such femininity, gendered, in order to be acknowledged. The New Woman nurse: Hilda Wade (1900) We find an interjection in the debate on nursing in Grant Allen’s novel Hilda Wade (1900), which through its characterisation of the New Woman nurse explores hospital hierarchies and their gendering of knowledge. Hilda Wade was first published in twelve instalments (1899–1900) in the Strand Magazine, but as Allen died before concluding the story, the last two tales were finished by his friend Arthur Conan Doyle. A note at the beginning of the final instalment explains that Conan Doyle had discussed the ending with Allen, had ‘gathered his ideas, and finally wrote it out for him in the form in which it now appears’ (Allen 1900a: 217). Early reviews of the novel were unenthusiastic: the Saturday Review calls the book ‘feeble’ and full of ‘twaddle’, reminding the reader that ‘in the mediocre novelist we have lost one who might have done infinitely better work’ (‘Hilda Wade’ 1900: 657), while The Academy admits that while this ‘story of modern life’ is at times absorbing, the novel is rather ‘tedious’ in its unrealistic adventures (‘Fiction. Hilda Wade’ 1900: 154). The Times similarly remarks that while the story is ‘clever and ingenious’, this ‘fairy tale of science’ is less believable than one of Charles Perrault’s tales (‘Hilda Wade (Grant Richards)’ 1900: 8). Allen’s last novel has received little scholarly

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attention: Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan mention the novel alongside Miss Cayley’s Adventures (1981: 25–8) as one of Allen’s female detectives, while Joseph Kestner notes the centrality in the novel of the debate regarding ‘female epistemology, whether women are intuitive or rational’ and places the novel in the ‘sub-­genre of the physician-­detective narrative’ (2003: 158–9). Although The Academy considers Hilda ‘the embodiment of a new type’ serving as ‘the mouthpiece of Science’ (1900: 153), the novel has mainly been read for its New Woman detective rather than for its figuration of a New Woman nurse invested in new medical science and technology. The novel presents the New Woman nurse and amateur detective Hilda Wade, who by her medical knowledge and skill overpowers the most esteemed medical man in London. Hilda is clearly a New Woman: she earns her own living, bicycles, travels to Southern Africa unaccompanied and is an amateur photographer. Like other athletic New Women, Hilda enjoys physical exercise: ‘she was in the main a bright, well-­educated, sensible, winsome, lawn-­tennis-­playing English girl’ (1900b: 70). The narrator, Hubert Cumberledge, is a doctor at St Nathaniel’s hospital where Hilda works, and the novel begins with a description not of Hilda, but of the famous doctor at St Nathaniel’s: Professor Sebastian. After mentioning Hilda’s ‘gift’ in only a sentence, the focus turns to this ‘eager, fiery-­eyed physiologist’ who with his ‘new methods’ inspires every young man at the hospital ‘to work in his laboratory, attend his lectures, study disease, and be a scientific doctor’ (1). Sebastian is the ‘greatest authority in Europe on comparative anatomy’ and Hubert simply names him ‘the Master’ (2, 1). Sebastian has only ‘one overpowering pursuit in life’: ‘the sacred thirst of knowledge . . . the advancement of science’ (3). He is presented as an embodiment of modern medicine and is the star of the hospital. But Hilda, too, has one overpowering goal in life: to clear her father’s reputation and expose Sebastian. When Hilda and Hubert first meet, she asks him to help her get a nurse’s place at St Nathaniel’s: ‘“It is my object in life to be near Sebastian – to watch him and observe him. I mean to succeed”’ (73). While, as expressed by Nightingale and other nursing handbooks, observing patients is one of the main duties of the modern nurse, Hilda however observes her superior. Hubert notices early on that Hilda is watching Sebastian: ‘Gentle and lovable as she was in every other aspect, towards Sebastian she seemed like a lynx-­eyed detective. She had some object in view, I thought, almost as abstract as his own – some object to which, as I judged, she was devoting her life quite as single-­mindedly as Sebastian himself had devoted his to the advancement of science’ (6). While Hubert assumes that Hilda means

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to study Sebastian’s revolutionising methods and inspiring manner, her real goal is to expose him as a murderer. As later revealed in the novel, Sebastian once poisoned a patient and blamed Hilda’s father, who died while awaiting trial. Unaware of her identity, Sebastian makes Hilda the Sister of Hubert’s ward, and attaches her to his own observation-­cots as a ‘special attendant for scientific purposes’ (96). When Hubert cannot figure out what Hilda’s precise plans are, he draws the conclusion that: ‘“It is very odd,” I mused. “But there! – women are inexplicable!”’ (7). Hubert throughout the novel disclaims Hilda’s knowledge, trying to explain its mysteriousness by gendering it. As noted in debates on hospital hierarchies, certain knowledge is not available for all to claim. The novel itself, however, notes the unstable construction of gender binaries through its discussion of the gendering of knowledge. ‘A rare measure of feminine intuition’: gendering knowledge

While modern medicine played a crucial role in transforming nursing, the obtaining of knowledge by nurses reworked the gendered power relations between doctors and nurses. Nursing publications negotiated this threat to the hospital hierarchy by referring to the specifically ‘womanly’ or domestic nature of nursing. While Nightingale referred to nursing as the most ‘womanly work’, Norris in 1891 argues that: ‘[t]o be either a good sister or Head Nurse requires all the qualifications it is possible for a Nurse to have; she should, in fact, be the very highest type of Nurse – I may go further, and say the very highest type of woman’ (1891: 3). The threat to male medical authority that modern nursing caused was thus restricted, or contained, by feminising nursing. One aspect of the changing doctor–nurse relationship concerns the question of what exactly can be called knowledge. Already at the outset of Hilda Wade there is a debate regarding what constitutes knowledge. Hubert describes Hilda as ‘endowed with an astounding memory and a rare measure of feminine intuition’ (70). As Chris Willis states, ‘feminine intuition’ was a concept often used to depreciate women ‘under the guise of praising them’ (2005: 145). While male doctors at the hospital possess medical knowledge, Hilda’s knowledge is instead named feminine intuition. Hubert posits what he sees as two kinds of knowledge as gendered opposites: The man of Nathaniel’s was revolutionising practice; and those who wished to feel themselves abreast of the modern movement were naturally anxious to cast in their lot with him. I did not wonder, therefore, that Hilda Wade, who herself possessed in so large a measure the deepest feminine gift – ­intuition

118    Gender, Technology and the New Woman – should seek a place under the famous professor who represented the other side of the same endowment in its masculine embodiment: instinct of diagnosis. (3)

Knowledge is here gendered: the medical scientific gaze is seen as the male counterpart to feminine intuition. As observed in the exclusivity of doctors to diagnose a patient, the valuing of medical skills and tools is dependent upon who utilises them. Sandelowski notes that the user context determined the prestige of implements that both physicians and nurses used: ‘Nursing continued to be legitimated not by science but, rather, by gender. The nurse’s use of a device depended on “skilful manipulation”; the physician’s use, on “scientific training.” Nurses watched out for patients the way nurturing women did; they did not watch them the way scientists did’ (2000: 98). There is a perceived gendered difference between the doctor’s scientific gaze and the nurse’s nurturing observation. While the male characters in the novel do not recognise this gendering, the text itself highlights the instability of this gendered division of knowledge produced within the hospital machinery, in calling the doctor’s gift an ‘instinct’ of diagnosis. An ‘instinct’ must surely be as un-­scientifically ‘feminine’ as ‘intuition’, rather than derived from scientific training. Furthermore, when Hilda later reveals Sebastian’s true nature as a man who would stab another man without remorse in order to advance knowledge, Hubert recognises ‘the truth of her diagnosis’ (132). He likewise recognises the truth of her processes of ‘detection’ (149). Hubert himself, however, does not consider the gender confusion of his narration. Sebastian admits that Hilda’s nursing skills through ‘her subtle knowledge of temperament sometimes enabled her closely to approach his own reasoned scientific analysis of a case’ (4). Like Hubert, Sebastian posits Hilda’s ‘subtle knowledge’ as merely approaching his own ‘scientific analysis’; she may come close to his approach, but it is not the same kind of intelligence. He states that while most women are ‘“quick at reading the passing emotion”’, they cannot judge underlying character (4). With men it is the other way around: they ‘“guide their life by definite facts – by signs, by symptoms, by observed data”’ (5). But Hilda is an exception; according to Sebastian, she ‘“stands intermediate mentally between the two sexes”’ in that she recognises ‘“temperament – the fixed form of character, and what it is likely to do – in a degree which I have never seen equalled elsewhere. To that extent, and within proper limits of supervision, I acknowledge her faculty as a valuable adjunct to a scientific practitioner”’ (5). The New Woman nurse is valuable here as an aide to the man of science.

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Hilda displays her extraordinary mental abilities when Sebastian experiments with a new anaesthetic which he names ‘lethodyne’. While in some cases the patients recover, in other cases they die, and Sebastian cannot make out any pattern from ‘his great researches’ (7). Hilda suggests a pattern to Sebastian who, while convinced, cannot supply an answer to how the lethodyne works. The professor is forced to ask Hilda about her principle, which turns out to be judged by the analogy of Indian hemp, learned by her experience as a nurse. While the Professor was the one to prescribe the Indian hemp, only Hilda with her hands­on experience as a nurse could observe the patients and draw these conclusions. Hilda’s suggestions, and her knowledge surpassing that of a doctor, displease Sebastian. He mutters: ‘“That young woman knows too much! . . . We shall have to suppress her, Cumberledge. . . . But I’ll wager my life she’s right, for all that. I wonder, now, how the dickens she guessed it!”’ (10–11). Hubert tries to account for Hilda’s explanation by denying its scientificity, again referring to Hilda’s ‘guessing’ as intuition, while Sebastian judges it to be ‘“just rapid and half-­unconscious inference”’ (11). In the eyes of these medical men, a nurse cannot have come to a conclusion by empirical scientific methods, but rather she must have ‘guessed’ it by order of that specifically feminine intuition. Sebastian determines to perform an operation with the assistance of lethodyne. While the patient responds well to the drug, Sebastian and his medical colleagues are convinced she will die after the operation. Hilda, however, by recalling the medical history of the patient’s relatives, believes the opposite. By Hilda’s ‘womanly’ care of feeding and comforting the patient, the young woman recovers, which makes Sebastian furious: ‘Cumberledge, this is disgraceful! A most disappointing case! A most provoking patient! . . . She ought to have died. It was her clear duty. I said she would die, and she should have known better than to fly in the face of the faculty. Her recovery is an insult to medical science. What is the staff about? Nurse Wade should have prevented it.’ (27–8)

Sebastian soon gives up on the drug, denying the status of Hilda’s methods as scientific knowledge: ‘“The weak point of lethodyne is this: nobody can be trusted to say when it may be used – except Nurse Wade, – which is not science”’ (29). Through Sebastian’s criteria for scientificity, the novel demonstrates the ways in which knowing is valued differently depending on gender and role in the hospital organisation. Hilda’s knowledge is under examination from the first moment she and Hubert meet. When Hilda, after seeing Hubert’s card with his name and workplace, recounts his family history, he fails to perceive her

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reasoning and begs her to tell him how she ‘“guessed”’ it. Hilda laughs and replies: ‘“Fancy asking a woman to give you ‘the train of reasoning’ for her intuitions! . . . That shows, Dr. Cumberledge, that you are a mere man – a man of science, perhaps, but not a psychologist”’ (67). As Kestner notes, the point here is that of course women have and can reason (2003: 161). Hilda goes on to explain systematically how, by her extraordinary memory of details such as newspaper notices, and by her deduction skills, she knew his family history: ‘“So there you have ‘the train of reasoning.’ Women can reason – sometimes”’ (68). As the reader cannot fail to notice, Hilda uses this ‘train of reasoning’ not sometimes but repeatedly throughout the novel. When other characters in the novel fail to understand Hilda’s reasoning, they name it ‘intuition’. Hubert cannot recognise Hilda’s reasoning as other than ‘guessing’ or ‘witchcraft’: ‘You are trying to mystify me. This is deliberate seer-­mongery. You are presuming on your powers. But I am not the sort of man to be caught by horoscopes. I decline to believe it. . . . Woman’s intuition is all very well in its way: but a mere man may be excused if he asks for evidence.’ (74–5)

Hubert repeatedly calls Hilda his ‘sibyl’ (11 passim) or a ‘witch’ (65 passim), ‘Cassandra’ (75), ‘[Delphic] pythoness’ (75) and ‘prophetess’ (76). She has a ‘sphinx-­like’ (10), ‘sibylline’ (99) or ‘Chaldean’ (185) smile. Hilda, however, offers to explain her methods fully to Hubert, declaring that she is speaking ‘“not at haphazard, but from observation and experience”’ (74). She denies the suspicion that her knowledge is some kind of mystery, and repeatedly corrects Hubert: ‘“No, not second sight; nothing uncanny, nothing supernatural. But prevision, yes: prevision based, not on omens or auguries, but on solid fact – on what I have seen and noticed. . . . I read no book of fate; I call no spirits from the vasty deep. I simply remember with exceptional clearness what I read and hear”’ (76, 99). The male characters in the novel, however, refuse to acknowledge Hilda’s methods as science. A consideration of Hilda’s detective and nursing skills in comparison to the most famous literary detective of the period, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, further highlights the gendering of knowledge in Allen’s novel. As explored in Chapter 6, Holmes’s methods are positivist scientific, comparable with the diagnosis of modern medical science. While Hilda explains her methods as prevision based on ‘observation and experience’ coupled with her extraordinary memory, Holmes in A Study in Scarlet (1887) similarly describes his scientific method as ‘observation and deduction’. Holmes has an extensive knowledge of anatomy and poisons, and his method of detection relies on the

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anatomo-­clinical methods of seeing and listening in order to produce knowledge. His examinations of callers indeed resemble a medical examination: it consists of seeing, questioning and drawing conclusions: ‘observation’ and ‘deduction’ (Conan Doyle 1996a: 17). In The Sign of Four (1890) Holmes explains that three qualities are needed for the ideal detective: the powers of observation, deduction and knowledge (1996b: 65). This is to be compared with Hilda’s extraordinary memory and knowledge of ‘solid fact’, from which she draws her conclusions. With her ‘analytical accuracy’ Hilda sees the fine grains, details, and can ‘divide and distinguish between case and case’ (96). In The Sign of Four Holmes, like Hilda, demands empirical evidence: ‘“No, no, I never guess. It is a shocking habit – destructive to the logical faculty”’ (1996b: 67). The medical gaze of scientificity proves to be the gaze of both doctor and detective. Interestingly, in the first ever Holmes story, Holmes in the chapter ‘The Science of Deduction’ uses the term ‘intuition’ to describe his ratiocinative method, admitting to Watson that he can unravel mysteries without even leaving his room: ‘“I have a kind of intuition that way. . . . From long habit the train of thoughts ran so swiftly through my mind that I arrived at the conclusion without being conscious of intermediate steps”’ (1996a: 17–18). While readers are by now used to Holmes’s explanations of his detection to Watson at the end of each story, Conan Doyle’s use of the word ‘intuition’ for his famous male detective seems to point to an unstable process of producing knowledge. While Hilda employs the Holmesian method of observation and deduction, her ‘gift’ cannot be referred to as science but only as feminine intuition. Although Hilda and Sebastian form their knowledge of things in a similar manner, he as a doctor and she as a nurse inhabit separate gendered positions in the hospital hierarchy; they do not share the same capacity to produce ‘truth’. While her position in the hospital provides the New Woman nurse Hilda with an opportunity to expose Sebastian, that very position also presupposes certain gendered behaviour. Similar to the way in which Nightingale’s radical ideas for reorganising hospitals needed to be ‘masked’ in domestic rhetoric, so too Hilda must lay claim to only a specifically feminine knowledge. ‘A dangerous edged-­tool’: the nurse as tool

In addition to nursing being posited as a specifically feminine occupation, the new gender relations in the medical field were negotiated through positing the nurse as a tool in a merely mechanical occupation. As seen in late nineteenth-­century nursing handbooks, New Style

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nursing is defined in relation to the modern technologies of the time. However, while the modern nurse is in charge of new medical knowledge and technologies, she herself is at times referred to as a tool for the physician. Sandelowski states that for most of the history of nursing, nursing and technology have been represented as servants to doctors: ‘Physicians thought of nurses much like stethoscopes and surgical instruments, as physical or bodily extensions of physicians. . . . Nurses have been regularly referred to as the physician’s eyes, hand, an “operational right arm”’ (2000: 3). The nurse thus becomes a double-­sided character, embodying both scientific technological care and ‘womanly’ sympathetic care: ‘[W]as the nurse separate from the X-­ray machine, stethoscope, and thermometer nurses and physicians used to care for patients, or was she herself an object that physicians and others used? Did nurses use thermometers, hypodermic syringes, and monitors, or were nurses themselves thermometers, needle bearers, and monitors?’ (Sandelowski 2000: 6). Similar to the descriptions of female typists as mere machines, as seen in Chapter 2, nursing is here reduced to being considered as merely mechanical work while simultaneously ‘sexed’ as feminine. One instance of this unsexing and re-­sexing of the nurse is seen in ‘Memories’ by A Hospital Nurse, where the nurse when first arriving at a big hospital feels like an automaton: ‘I felt no longer a human being with warm, quick sympathies, but just a tiny bit of a mighty machine revolving in its ceaseless daily grind. Life was a treadmill’ (1910: 17). However, the nurse gets used to the work and sees that the life in a big hospital ‘need not necessarily destroy “the woman in one,” as I have heard it asserted of hospital training on the large scale’ (17). Being a true nurse does not just involve mechanically keeping charts: ‘If that is nursing, one might as well have an automatic machine with clockwork arranged to give an alarm at specified hours, and jerk out a ledge containing a feeder of milk, etc., or a medicine glass with a correct dose of the mixture, placed by one’s bedside’ (100). A nurse is more than this, as she needs specific ‘womanly’ nursing qualities in order to prevent nursing from becoming a mechanical occupation. However, much like the calls from typists to acknowledge the intellectual aspect of their occupation, Norris’s Nursing Notes (1891) presents knowledge and modern technology as ways of preventing nursing from becoming a merely mechanical profession. The author states her intention ‘to give such a general idea of anatomy and physiology as will enable you to be intelligent Nurses, and not mere machines’ (1891: 8). Knowledge of anatomy and physiology, and medical techniques, is what prevents a nurse from becoming a doctor’s mere tool. While knowledge is gendered in many ways in Hilda Wade, the novel

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examines the tension between seeing the nurse as speaking from a privileged position and as merely being a tool for doctors. These two views of the nurse as technology or of the nurse in control of technologies co-­exist. Professor Sebastian on several occasions refers to Hilda as an instrument or tool: ‘“A nurse with brains is such a valuable accessory – unless, of course, she takes to thinking. But Nurse Wade never thinks: she is a useful instrument – does what she’s told, and carries out one’s orders implicitly”’ (84). In ‘The Episode of the Needle that Did Not Match’, however, this formulation of the nurse-­as-­tool is questioned. Once Sebastian has been made aware of Hilda’s real purpose he is set on getting rid of her. Hubert realises that ‘a life-­long duel was in progress between these two – a duel of some strange and mysterious import’ (133–4). When Sebastian during an operation mentions, with a meaning glance at Hilda, the ‘notorious poisoner’ Dr Yorke-­Bannerman, Hubert notices that ‘some strange passage of arms’ has taken place between Sebastian and Hilda, although during the operation they ‘called a truce over the patient’s body’ (135, 138). Accompanying the text are illustrations by Gordon Browne, whose rendering of the operation scene depicts Hilda in the centre of the illustration, the haughty Sebastian observing her, circled by a group of medical men (Figure 4.1). The life-­long duel is not merely one between two individuals, but it is also a struggle of gendered hierarchies within the hospital; the threat to the male doctor’s authority by the nurse’s presence within the hospital. There is a dual significance to the notion of the nurse as tool: if kept

Figure 4.1  ‘With a little scream she let the basin fall’, in Grant Allen, Hilda Wade (London: Grant Richards, 1900). University of Alberta Libraries.

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obedient and docile she is benign, but she can also turn into a dangerous instrument. Sebastian calls his newly found enemy ‘“a dangerous edged-­ tool”’: ‘“When she’s clothed and in her right mind, she is a valuable accessory – sharp and trenchant like a clean, bright lancet: but when she allows one of these causeless hysterical fits to override her tone, she plays one false at once – like a lancet that slips, or grows dull and rusty”’ (146). As Sebastian says this, he is polishing one of his needles, ‘as if to give point and illustration to his simile’ (146). While Sebastian earlier referred to Hilda as ‘a useful instrument’, now the ‘accessory’ nurse has turned into ‘a dangerous edged-­tool’: she is a lancet, that is, a scalpel with a double-­edged blade. Sebastian first tries to get rid of Hilda by asking her for a blood sample. As the professor takes her offered forefinger, nipping the last joint between his fingers for a moment, he chooses ‘with great deliberation and selective care, a particular needle’ for his hypodermic syringe: ‘Hilda’s eyes followed his every movement as closely and as fearlessly as ever. Sebastian’s hand was raised, and he was just about to pierce the delicate white skin, when, with a sudden, quick scream of terror, she snatched her hand away hastily’ (143). Hilda manages to catch the needle unobserved, and presents it to Hubert for examination. One of the most common tasks for the modern nurse, or most associated with her, is giving injections. As attested by nursing publications such as The Nursing Record and Norris’s Nursing Notes, being able to handle syringes is part of a nurse’s training. Hilda shows Hubert certain oddities in the needle: a tiny groove in the needle, which Hilda is certain that Sebastian made himself. The rough, jagged edge, she explains, would hold the material that he wished to inject, while its saw-­like points would tear the flesh imperceptibly. When Hubert comments on the quickness of Hilda’s detection, she compares herself to the medical tool they are handling: ‘“Yes; but you tell me my eyes are as sharp as the needle”’ (149). The needle turns out to contain the bacillus of pyaemia; blood-­poisoning. An illustration by Browne depicts Hilda by the microscope, studying the pyaemia bacillus, while Hubert stands behind her grasping his heart and confessing his love for her; Hilda coolly and scientifically prefers the microscope to his amorous declarations. By means of her acute observational skills as a nurse and her knowledge of modern medical tools, Hilda thwarts the Professor’s plans. The nurse Hilda by her extraordinary intelligence, observational skills and knowledge of medical technologies thus outsmarts the leading man of the medical world. Despite her subordinate place in the hierarchical machinery of the hospital, she still has an agency of her own. Through her control over medical technology both as knowledge and as material

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object, Hilda is not merely made into a tool herself but rather manages to question the doctor’s authority. Hilda decides to leave the hospital to flee further attempts on her life, and also to find out a new way to expose Sebastian. Negotiating positions

While the institutional technology of the hospital genders and orders knowledge, there is still room for change in this hierarchical organisation. Power, within a Foucauldian framework, is not something that can be ‘held’ or ‘withheld’ by a person or institution, but works rather as a mobile structure housing ‘a multiform production of relations of domination’ (Foucault 1980b: 142). The relationship between Hilda and Sebastian in Hilda Wade might be read in this context of changeable power relations, not as fixed structures but as constant struggles: ‘at the same time mutual incitement and struggle; less of a face-­to-­face confrontation that paralyzes both sides than a permanent struggle’ (Foucault 2002: 342). There is always a reciprocal appeal, much like the ‘life-­long duel’ (133) being waged between Sebastian and Hilda. Browne provides an illustration of this duel, depicting the moment when Sebastian learns of Hilda’s real identity and object: the austere Sebastian and a defiant Hilda quietly meeting each other’s glances (Figure 4.2). While medical and public discourses of the time distinguish between the gendered types of knowledge that the nurse and doctor might possess, Hilda Wade calls this gendering into question by reworking power relations from inside the machinery of the clinical hospital. The necessity for coding the modern nurse in a certain femininity may be seen as a way of negotiating the new space opened up for women in medicine. While Hilda is described as standing intermediate mentally between the sexes, her womanliness is repeatedly commented upon. Hubert gazes at her and ponders her exterior beauty: ‘What a beautiful, tender, sympathetic face! And yet, how able!’ (132). Hilda herself appeals to a notion of ‘womanly’ secrecy to avoid revealing her purpose: ‘“Do not ask me to reveal it; do not ask me to forgo it. I am a woman, therefore weak”’ (133). Despite this claim to ‘weak’ ‘womanliness’, Hilda acts independently while Hubert cannot do without her. Hubert follows Hilda’s trail to the territory then known as the British colonial protectorate Rhodesia, now the country Zimbabwe (and parts of Zambia), in southern Africa. The Rhodesians (as the white settlers are termed by the narrator) have noted Hilda’s coming because of the ‘strange peculiarity’ (179) of her being the only woman of means who has ever gone there of her own free will. These chapters set in southern

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Figure 4.2  ‘Their glances met’, in Grant Allen, Hilda Wade (London: Grant Richards, 1900). University of Alberta Libraries.

Africa firmly align the novel with the British imperial project, going so far as to have some of the white settlers suggest that Hilda has ‘designs against the stern celibacy of a leading South African politician’: ‘“Depend upon it,” they said, “it’s Rhodes she’s after”’ (179). The settlers mean none other than Cecil Rhodes, the capitalist and imperialist politician who, through the British South Africa Company, made claims on the territory. Performing the cultural work of British imperialism, the novel characterises Rhodesia and southern Africa as an ‘uncivilized’ backdrop to Hilda’s modern New Woman character. When Hubert finds Hilda in Rhodesia, he is amazed to see a bicycle coming towards him: ‘I could hardly believe my eyes. Civilisation indeed! A bicycle in these remotest wilds of Africa! . . . In the midst of all this crude, unfinished land the mere sight of a bicycle, bumping over the rubbly road, was a sufficient surprise: but my astonishment reached a climax when I saw as it drew near that it was ridden by a woman!’ (181). The bicycle, the emblematic New Woman mode of transport, here not only emphasises Hilda’s independence, but also the technological modernity that was partly used as an argument for British imperialism. On this same bicycle Hilda, simultaneously carrying a neighbour’s

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baby in her arms, later flees an army of ‘Matabele’ (the colonial British name for the Ndebele people) rebels. Allen places the narrative in the midst of the 1896–7 Matabele Rebellion, a revolt led by the Northern Ndebele people (later joined by the Shona people) against the British South Africa Company. When Hilda and Hubert are chased by the rebels, Allen poses the modern technology of the bicycle, and its female cyclist, as a sign of white British imperial superiority: Looking behind me with a hasty glance, I could see that the savages, taken aback, had reined in to deliberate at our unwonted evolution. I feel sure that the novelty of the iron horse, with a woman riding it, played not a little on the superstitious fears; they suspected, no doubt, this was some ingenious new engine of war devised against them by the unaccountable white man: it might go off unexpectedly in their faces at any moment. (212)

The modern technology is described by Allen as an ‘iron horse’ that must play on the ‘superstitious fears’ of the Africans. Hilda is determined to hold the neighbour’s baby, despite Hubert’s insisting on him carrying it on his horse: ‘She vaulted lightly on to the seat, white and tired as she was, with the baby in her left arm, and her right hand on the handle-­bar. . . . Hilda pedalled bravely by my side’ (208). This moment is captured in Browne’s illustration, where we see Hilda, with the baby under one arm and a grave look on her face, spurring her bicycle (Figure 4.3). This image of the modern, emancipated, but still essentially maternal and ‘womanly’ woman seems emblematic of that ‘dual consciousness’ (Willis 2005: 151) of Allen’s New Woman characters; their uneasy position between emancipatory struggle and biological urges. Despite Hilda’s subversive methods, Allen’s novel with its ‘maternalist rhetoric’ might in this way still be read as reinforcing ‘the idealised figure’ (Galletly 2015/16) of the selfless feminine nurse. Hilda and Hubert manage to escape to the nearest town, where Hubert joins the white colonials’ battle against the African rebels. Allen’s narrator admits that the rebels may have been justified in their claims: ‘I do not know whether the natives were justified in rising or not; most likely, yes; for we had stolen their country’ (220). Despite this admission, Hubert refers to the rebels as ‘bloodthirsty savages’ (201) or ‘black human ants’ (237), declaring that ‘[i]n a conflict of race we must back our own colour . . . when the security of white women depended upon repelling them, I felt I had no alternative’ (220). The dehumanising language describing black Africans as ‘savages’ or ‘ants’ reinforces late Victorian white supremacist notions of racial inferiority, Hubert employing the imperialist trope of white men having to save white women from the violence of black men, in an attempt to justify

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Figure 4.3  ‘Hilda pedalled bravely by my side’, in Grant Allen, Hilda Wade (London: Grant Richards, 1900). University of Alberta Libraries.

the s­ ettlers’ action. In the chapters set in southern Africa, we thus see a further complication of the New Woman as a sign of progress, newness and modernity, as the novel signals this gendered emancipation as a typically white British force against supposedly ‘uncivilized’ territories. While Hilda and Hubert make friends with Rhodesian Boers or Dutch settlers, other white Rhodesians believe the Matabele Rebellion to be instigated by an enemy of Rhodes’s, possibly one of the Transvaal Boers: ‘“Depend upon it, it’s Kruger’s doing”’ (217). However, it turns out that it is Sebastian who has incited the rebellion, supplying weapons and instructing the rebels to kill all the white women, to get rid of Hilda. In this way, the Matabele or Ndebele rebellion in the novel becomes part of the villain’s revenge on Hilda. Published during the 1899–1902 Boer War, the novel’s alignment of Sebastian with the Boers, including the president of the Transvaal Republic and propagator for the Boer cause Paul Kruger, is of special importance in terms of British foreign policy. Describing Sebastian as a white man with a ‘kaffir’s’ (nineteenth-­ century designation for a black African) heart, and as a ‘“[f]riend of old [Ndebele king] Moselekatse”’ (234), the novel aligns the villain of the novel not only with the Boers, but with African rebels, thus by default aligning the New Woman heroine with the opposite (British) side.

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With Hubert following Hilda, the gendered doctor–nurse power relationship is reworked, as Hubert is the one obeying or disobeying Hilda’s orders. After the battle in Rhodesia, Hubert follows Hilda to India. When on an expedition into the hills to see Buddhist monasteries, they are tricked by Sebastian, who hires a rogue guide to take them into an area of Tibet where hostile monks reside. Just as Hilda’s modern bicycle serves to confound the Ndebele rebels, so also her photography skills help to convince the monks: ‘She had bought herself a first-­rate camera of the latest scientific pattern at Bombay, and ever since had spent all her time and spoiled her pretty hands in “developing”’ (283). By displaying her knowledge of Buddhist ceremony and presenting her photographs of Buddhist temples and tombs, Hilda appeases the monks. Hubert further astounds the monks by constructing a zoetrope of some of the photographs (thus making ‘a living picture like a cinematograph’ (304)), only wishing he would also have had a phonograph to further exhibit the technological modernity of their homeland. After escaping Tibet, Hilda and Hubert are called by some locals to help nurse a white man dangerously ill with a malignant fever: the man turns out to be Sebastian. The tables are now turned: Hilda, whom Sebastian has repeatedly tried to kill, is now nursing him. Sebastian’s position as the leading medical man in Europe and star of a London hospital is replaced by that of a helpless patient in the Himalayan mountains: ‘On a native bed, in a corner of the one room, a man lay desperately ill: a European, with white hair and with a skin well bronzed by exposure to the tropics. Ominous dark spots beneath the epidermis showed the nature of the disease. He tossed restlessly as he lay, but did not raise his fevered head or look at my conductor’ (313). Already Hubert has surrendered to Hilda’s wants; now Sebastian, too, is under her control. While Sebastian refuses to be nursed by Hilda, she prepares the professor’s food and chooses his servants: she needs to keep him alive so that he can confess to killing her father. As the words of a nurse are not considered as truth when put against the words of a respected medical doctor, this life-­long duel represents a wider struggle regarding what counts as truth and knowledge. While Sebastian has been following Hilda since she left the hospital, now she is following him, taking the same steamer as the professor back to England. Hubert tells the professor that, try as he might, Sebastian cannot avoid Hilda: ‘“We will dog you now through life . . . It is you who need to slink and cower, not we. The prosecutor need not descend to the sordid shifts of the criminal”’ (329). The steamer is shipwrecked, and Hilda catches a life-­raft, onto which she drags herself and the unconscious Sebastian, before they are rescued by another steamer. Hilda saving his life a second time makes Sebastian confess; on her

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demand he gives a public, attested confession, given before witnesses, signed and sworn to. The gendered power relationship is now reworked, as Hilda is the one making demands of her former superior at the hospital: ‘“Do it for me! I ask it of you not as a favour, but as a right. I demand it!”’ (350). The witnesses she insists on are such ‘“as will carry absolute conviction to the mind of all the world: irreproachable, disinterested witnesses: official witnesses”’ (350). These are a commissioner of oaths, a medical doctor, the man who defended Hilda’s father at the trial and the journalist who watched the case on Sebastian’s behalf. These same medical and juridical men, all part of large knowledge-­ producing institutions, would before have thought Hilda ‘malicious or hysterical’ (152), but with the famous doctor Sebastian’s words legitimating her story, she is seen as trustworthy. Sebastian now admits to having murdered Dr Yorke-­Bannerman and acknowledges Hilda’s role in making the truth public. He declares to the four witnesses: ‘“Your presence here is a proof that she has prevailed. . . . The police . . . were incompetent and the legal advisers of Dr. Bannerman hardly less so, and a woman only has had the wit to see that a gross injustice has been done”’ (353–5). Hilda is thus finally able to challenge the well-­known professor’s version of the truth, but still through the specific gendering of her knowledge and profession. As explored in this chapter, while a large institutional technology such as the hospital may encourage hierarchical structures in which persons come to be seen as tools, technologies can also be taken up by people in order not to be employed as tools. The New Style nurse is at times referred to as a doctor’s tool, but it is also her use of new technologies that forms her profession and legitimates her knowledge: the clinical hospital takes part in making nursing ‘scientific’. Modern nursing makes possible a certain kind of limited authority; the nurse must negotiate her position as a trained nurse and at the same time remain ‘womanly’. In Allen’s Hilda Wade, Hilda and Sebastian are posited as opposites, he embodying the authoritative male medical scientificity, and she the ‘womanliness’ of nursing. Medical modernity in this way limits the nurse simultaneously as it provides her with a position from which to speak: the New Style nurse must appear ‘feminine’ to make nursing into a respectable occupation.

Notes 1. As Monica Baly points out, Nightingale alone did not reform nursing: although the nineteenth-­century nursing reforms came to be associated with

Medical New Women I: Nurses    131 Nightingale, ‘the circumstances produced the leader and the time was ripe’ (1995: 124). In the late nineteenth century, Baly writes, ‘a number of factors [medical advances such as antiseptic surgery, anaesthesia, and Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus] came together to give the concept of “trained nursing” an impetus undreamt of by the mid-­century reformers’ (1995: 124). 2. Before the emergence of modern hospital-­ trained nursing, there were mainly four kinds of nursing: domestic nursing (by friends and family), the handywoman (often women from a lower social class who nursed against payment, like Dickens’s Sairey Gamp), the private nurse (women of a higher social class, engaged mostly as companions), and treatment assistants (male medical attendants such as apothecaries and dressers). There were economic as well as gender distinctions: private nurses were integrated into the service of the affluent, while handywomen were autonomous workers among the poor (Dingwall et al. 1988: 7, 16). 3. Although this was the first Nightingale training school, there had been earlier nursing schools. Among these were the Kaiserwerth Institution in Germany and St John’s House in London (founded 1848), and from 1856 pupil nurses had been admitted to King’s College Hospital in London (Poovey 237, note 3). Nightingale herself had been trained in Germany before going to the Crimea. 4. Not just medical technologies are essential to the modern nurse: there are several references in The Nursing Record to bicycles as the specific mode of transport. As an 1898 Notes section proclaims: ‘The nurse who does not cycle is now the exception that proves the rule’ (‘A Bicycle Luncheon Basket’ 1898: 196). 5. Many New Woman writers themselves, however, trained as nurses: Kathleen Mannington Caffyn (‘Iota’) trained at St Thomas Hospital before beginning her literary career, while George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne) also trained in London (Shaw and Randolph 2007: xi, xiv). Olive Schreiner (although dreaming of a doctor’s career) registered to train as a nurse at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, but had to leave because of poor health (Schreiner 1881). 6. Vivisection (surgery on a living organism for experimental rather than healing purposes) was a topic of heated debate in Britain during the turn of the century, and there were strong ties between the women’s and anti-­ vivisection movements.

Chapter 5

Medical New Women II: Doctors

The last decades of the nineteenth century were a period of intense change within the medical profession; they signified the moment when ‘old-­style medicine was dying and the modern medical profession was emerging’ (Darby 2007: xx). As Arthur Conan Doyle notes in 1910: ‘this generation has, as it seems to me, brought about a greater change in medical science than any century has done before’ (1910: 105). Medical modernity – that ‘greater change’ in medicine described by Conan Doyle – was not limited to new medical technologies and scientific discoveries: late nineteenth-­century medical modernity also involved a reworking of notions of gender, epitomised in the debates regarding female doctors. The history of female doctors in Britain is a fairly recent one, and it is bound up with the history of women gaining access to higher education, as part of the wider fight for women’s rights in the nineteenth century. Although women were at last accepted into the clinical hospital as trained nurses, the entry into this medical sphere as doctors proved more difficult. While William Ernest Henley described the transformation of nursing in his 1877 collection In Hospital, he left out any mention of the struggles of female doctors in the late nineteenth century. A few years later, however, the poet Constance Naden pictures this modern phenomenon in ‘The Lady Doctor’ (1881), describing the figure as a ‘spinster gaunt and grey’ with a stern aspect: A Doctor she – her sole delight To order draughts as black as night,   Powders, and pills, and lotions; Her very glance might cast a spell Transmuting Sherry and Moselle   To chill and acrid potions. (1894: 81)

Naden’s woman doctor was once a blooming young woman, who threw off her young gentleman ‘[t]o be a Lady Doctor’, now valuing men as

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‘neither patients for advice / Nor subjects for dissection’ (83). While Nightingale’s New Style nurse was configured as especially feminine, the female or later New Woman doctor was – similarly to her typing and bicycling counterparts – posited as an ‘unsexed’ or ‘unwomanly’ creature. Entering universities and clinics, it was argued both in public discourse and among many medical professionals, would desensitise women to suffering, thereby ‘unsexing’ them. Indeed, Naden’s unmarried woman ‘seems a man in woman’s clothes, / All female graces slighting’ (84), secretly longing for the love she once declined. Naden’s characterisation of the late nineteenth-­century female doctor as unfeminine or even ‘unsexed’, and her positioning of marriage and the medical profession as incompatible, are recurrent themes throughout popular and professional debates and in literary texts of the time. Women’s entry into the medical sphere as doctors was marked by gendered debates around medical authority and professionalism. These debates regarding female doctors became part of the period’s larger conflict over the Woman Question and later over the New Woman. Describing the place of early female doctors in the fight for women’s access to higher education, this chapter places the campaigning work of early female doctors such as Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-­ Blake alongside the cultural work of literary texts. Reading Margaret Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1892) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’ (1894) alongside other literary figurations of the New Woman doctor, as well as contemporary debates in medical publications, the chapter draws attention to the harassment faced by early female doctors and the ways in which these women threatened established gender norms.

Medical Women in Higher Education Although the 1870 Education Act provided for compulsory primary education, it was not until 1880 that a sufficient number of schools were built for this to be fully implemented. Meanwhile, secondary and higher education remained very much the province of the upper-­ middle-­class male (Willis 1999: 58). As women’s demand for entry into higher education grew in the last few decades of the century, so did the opposition to this movement. The 1870s saw a plethora of ‘scientific’ or pseudoscientific theories of the female mind and body become part of the public debate: psychologists, physicians, anthropologists, biologists and sexologists presented ‘evidence’ to already established presumptions of women’s inferiority. Charles Darwin saw a distinct difference in the

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mental power of men and women, claiming in the 1871 The Descent of Man that ‘[t]he chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain – whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands’, from which follows that ‘the average standard of mental power in man must be above that of woman’ (1871: 327). To many physicians and scientists, any kind of either physical or mental activity for women inferred a questioning not only of social roles but of the natural order. Many physicians saw the supposed effect of mental exercise on women’s health in terms of economising: the female body’s supposedly finite resources were seen as being channelled into the wrong area. In order to spend the mind’s and body’s resources on studying, other womanly functions (such as reproductive ones) would have to suffer. One of the main opponents of women’s entry to higher education was the British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley, who claimed in his 1874 article ‘Sex and Mind in Education’ that ‘[w]hen Nature spends in one direction, she must economise in another direction’ (1874: 467). In this light, Maudsley asserts, it is questionable ‘whether women can scorn delights, and live laborious days of intellectual exercise and production, without injury to their functions as the conceivers, mothers and nurses of children’ (471). In Maudsley’s view, female intellectual work can thus only be achieved at the price of ‘a puny, enfeebled and sickly race’ (472). Due to such physiological theories of women’s supposed physical and mental character, higher education and especially the study and practice of medicine was seen as a profession unfit for women, leaving early women doctors to fight a grim struggle against established opinions.1 While Elizabeth Garrett Anderson is famous in medical history as the first woman in Britain to register as a medical doctor in 1866, having passed the exam administered by the Hall of Apothecaries in 1865 after training privately, it was Sophia Jex-­Blake who worked publicly for female medical students’ right to university training and graduation, inciting and playing a major role in the debates regarding female doctors in the late nineteenth century. William Knox names Jex-­Blake ‘arguably the most important figure in the women’s movement in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century’ (2006: 70), while her biographer Margaret Todd claims that Jex-­Blake indeed ‘was the movement . . . she stood . . . for women’ (1918: vii). After Garrett Anderson’s registration, the Hall of Apothecaries changed its regulations to bar women from the exam. However, in 1869 Jex-­Blake and six other women – together known as the ‘Edinburgh Seven’ – matriculated at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh.

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Jex-­ Blake’s campaigning and the ‘Edinburgh Seven’ sparked great controversies surrounding women’s right to enter higher education and their professional authority. Women’s entry into higher education as medical students was particularly threatening. The clinical hospital had been established as a male sphere, an institution of power and knowledge-­production, and while medical men eventually accepted the entry of women as nurses – who were subordinated to male medical authority – they could not accept women as doctors. In her essay ‘Medicine as a Profession for Women’, Jex-­Blake notes the inconsistency in seeing nursing but not doctoring as a suitable career for women: [W]hile almost everybody applauds and respects Miss Nightingale and her followers for their brave disregard of conventionalities on behalf of suffering humanity, and while hardly any one would pretend that there was any want of feminine delicacy in their going among the foulest sights and most painful scenes, to succour, not their own sex, but the other, many people yet profess to be shocked when other women desire to fit themselves to take the medical care of those of their sisters who would gladly welcome their aid. Where is the real difference? If a woman is to be applauded for facing the horrors of an army hospital when she believes that she can there do good work, why is she to be condemned as indelicate when she professes her wilingness to go through an ordeal, certainly no greater, to obtain the education necessary for a medical practitioner? (1872: 35–6)

Where, indeed, is the real difference? British physician Charles West in Medical Women: A Statement and an Argument (1878) defends the differentiation between the nurse’s and the doctor’s gendered roles, claiming that the requirements for the two professions are widely different: ‘that as a rule they will be taken from different classes of society, and that they need in the one case a shorter and less complete education than in the other. Of the perfect nurse we require, first of all, a quality which is the especial attribute of woman’ (1878: 21–2). That specifically ‘womanly’ attribute is ‘tenderness’, West argues (22), along the lines of Nightingale’s declaration in Notes on Nursing (1859) that ‘every woman is a nurse’ (1980: v). West here reiterates a popular argument among medical men; just a few years earlier an unsigned article in medical journal The Lancet states the journal’s position as maintaining that ‘female medical practitioners are neither necessary nor desirable’ (‘Medical Women’ 1876: 397). However, women who want to enter the medical profession, states the anonymous contributor, can join that ‘department of medical practice which is properly open to them – namely, as midwives and nurses’ (398). In a letter to the editor in The Lancet a few years earlier, Henry Bennet, M.D. similarly presents midwifery as an alternative:

136    Gender, Technology and the New Woman I believe, most conscientiously and thoroughly that, as a body, they are sexually, constitutionally, and mentally unfitted for the hard and incessant toil, and for the heavy responsibilities of general medical and surgical practice. At the same time I believe, as thoroughly, that there is a branch of our profession – midwifery – to which they might and ought to be admitted in a subordinate position as the rule. (1870: 887)

Working as a nurse or midwife still entails submitting to the doctor’s command, the nurse posited – as shown in the previous chapter – as a ‘tool’ in his hands, while the authority of producing knowledge through giving diagnosis is still reserved for men. The hostile response of the medical establishment is thus not against women working in hospitals, but against women entering another knowledge-­producing institution alongside the clinical hospital – that of the university – and thus becoming producers of knowledge alongside male doctors. There is furthermore the question of professionalism: are women qualified to tend to patients as doctors rather than as nurses? R. N. Fowler in a letter to the editor of The Lancet fears a lowered standard of medical care; he compares women doctors to ‘homeopathists and hydropathists’ and fears that the public will believe that ‘some lady doctor will do equally well’ as a medical man (1877: 954). West, too, argues that while women can undoubtedly do some of the things that men do – for example preach, command a regiment or navigate a ship – the question is whether they should: ‘[C]ould she study and practise medicine, and leave undone those special duties which her sex, and hers alone, can discharge?’ (1878: 27). The answer is, of course, negative, as West – alongside Maudsley – specifically notes the tendency for women to become ‘irritable’ and ‘capricious’ at ‘times’ (that is to say during their period), and thus unfit for work (31). An 1870 letter by ‘Mater’ to the editor of The Lancet claims that not only are women unfitted physically for medical work as doctors, but also morally, as women simply ‘cannot (even the best of them) hold their tongues’: ‘Who can forbid to the fair doctoress, that one dearest friend, to whom, “in confidence,” the interesting case of Mrs. M. or Mrs. N. could be duly “talked over,” and in process communicated to every lady within a radius of several miles?’ (1870: 680). Women’s supposed tendency to gossip is thus seen as a further proof against the cause of women doctors, as they cannot adhere to professional secrecy. In addition to the supposed danger to women’s physical and mental health in higher education, for female medical students their morality or ‘delicacy’ was threatened. Medical training, especially anatomy classes and dissection, would make female doctors ‘unwomanly’, or, as London surgeon Jonathan Hutchinson suggests in the British Medical Journal,

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would lower the standard of ‘feminine delicacy’ (1876: 233). Hutchinson had already anonymously published his views in the 1870 article ‘Lady Surgeons’ in the same journal, claiming to question not so much whether women are suited to medical study but rather whether society would benefit from this change. In this earlier article he argues that a ‘longer experiment’ is desirable before the cause of the woman doctor can be supported, but still concludes by calling the female doctor a ‘traitress to her sex’ for desiring independence (1870: 338). The later article reiterates the claims of the previous one, calling the movement for women’s entry into the medical profession ‘short-­sighted and suicidal on the part of the female sex’ (1876: 233). While Hutchinson presents a variety of reasons as to why women should not be doctors, he comes back to the question of feminine ‘delicacy’ and the destruction of this characteristic by anatomical study. He is convinced that if the public, who claim that ‘there is nothing indelicate or improper’ in women’s study and practice of medicine, would ‘really know what a full knowledge of pathology implies, what the dissecting-­ room is, the kind of information to be found in many of our medical works, and lastly, but chiefly, that it is impossible to know one part well without knowing all’ – including, of course, all parts of the male anatomy – they ‘would exclaim at once, “By all means let such things be left to men”’ (234). Women can be nurses but should stay away from the ‘masculine’ side of medicine, that is to say the specific medical knowledge, skill and technique, which can be obtained only from medical studies including anatomy and dissection. What New Woman writers later term the ‘horror’ of the dissecting room thus threatens the female medical student’s ‘womanliness’. However, not all medical men opposed the entry of women into higher education or the medical professional sphere. The British Medical Journal from time to time publishes sympathetic letters, such as the one penned by Frederick J. Brown, M.D., who announces that he ‘advocate[s] the rights of women, both with respect to academic degrees and the practice of the learned professions’, and concludes with a ‘call upon my male professional brethren to extend a helping hand towards our female brethren’ (1873: 690–1). Similarly, medical graduate Samuel Wilks writes a letter to the same journal in support of the admission of women to the University of London. Wilks announces that, in opposition to many of his contemporaries, he supports the effort made for the higher education of women, especially as regarded ‘from a professional point of view’, as women who are active, well-­educated and engaged in work are generally healthier than women in want of an occupation; indeed, the ‘sickly, complaining creatures, who are ever in the doctors’ hands, are those who are doing nothing’ (1874: 695).

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While female doctors and medical students had the support of a few medical men and voices in the press, they had to endure much prejudice and harassment. In Medical Women: A Thesis and a History (1886), Jex-­Blake describes both the ‘very wide attention and sympathy’ that the cause of early women doctors attracted, and some of the abuse suffered by female medical students: damage of their property, anonymous letters and several other variations of harassment (1886: 110–11). Edith Pechey, one of the seven female medical students at Edinburgh, describes such incidents in a letter to The Scotsman, relating her harassment by male medical students. These men, Pechey narrates, ‘find pleasure in following a woman through the streets, and . . . shout after her all the foulest epithets in their very voluminous vocabulary of abuse’, at occasions ‘using medical terms to make the disgusting purport of their language more intelligible to me’ (1871: 5). Arguments against the Edinburgh Seven’s admission ranged from beliefs that mixed classes would ‘impair class discipline and inhibit lectures on “sensitive” subjects such as anatomy’ (Finkelstein 1995: 334) to the suggestions that women were biologically unfit for medical practice. As the University of Edinburgh refused to admit women to anatomy and surgery classes, they had extramural anatomy classes at Surgeons’ Hall. For the Edinburgh Seven, the sustained harassment came to a full point in November 1870 during what came to be called the Surgeons’ Hall Riot, when on eighteenth November about two hundred medical students physically hindered the women from entering the building for an anatomy examination, instead hurling abuse at them and passing bottles of whisky around (Knox 2006: 81). Even though the behaviour of the male students at the Riot was condemned both by the university and the press, after years of conflict, the Universityof Edinburgh decided in 1873 that women would not be able to obtain a medical degree. Despite this, Jex-­Blake continued campaigning, and in 1874 Jex-­Blake together with Garrett Anderson and other female physicians co-­founded the London School of Medicine for Women, the first medical school in Britain to train women. Female medical students then sought degrees from continental European schools or from the school set up by Garrett Anderson and Jex-­ Blake in London, or later on from Jex-­ Blake’s Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, which was founded in 1886. While the University of London began to permit women students in 1878, other British universities did not follow until ten years later, and in Scottish universities – including the medical programme at the University of Edinburgh – women were allowed entry first in 1892.

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An ‘Uninteresting Hybrid’: The New Woman Doctor As author Hilda Gregg notes in 1898, literary figurations of women doctors were crucial to the public’s ultimate acceptance of the phenomenon in reality: ‘It was necessary for the medical woman to prove her fitness to survive before receiving, like the feminine use of the bicycle and other social developments, the stamp of approval of those in high places’ (1898: 94). Similarly, Jex-­Blake in an 1893 review of the ‘half-­ dozen romances’ featuring medical women, published since the 1870s, notes that fictional configurations of the woman doctor are ‘likely to influence [public] judgment or action’ (1893: 261) on the question of women doctors. She furthermore hopes that more authors will present ‘golden words’ which may ‘penetrate where ours can find no entrance’ (272), that is to provide works which may make the public more amenable to the cause of women doctors. In her novel The Story of an African Farm (1883), often considered the first New Woman novel, Olive Schreiner has her character Lyndall declare: ‘“When we ask to be doctors, lawyers, law-­makers, anything but ill-­paid drudges, they say, – No; but you have men’s chivalrous attention; now think of that and be satisfied!”’ (1892: 174). Even this early New Woman heroine voices an interest in the medical profession, linking society’s unwillingness to accept this path for women with a general resistance toward female emancipation.2 While Schreiner’s novel notes the struggle of women doctors, the first literary work to thoroughly explore the question was Charles Reade’s 1877 A Woman-­Hater. This novel, first published in instalments during 1876–7 in the Edinburgh’s Blackwood Magazine, gives a fictional account of the struggles faced by the Edinburgh Seven. Through the narrative of the female doctor Rhoda Gale, here presented as one of the Edinburgh Seven, Reade manages to ‘tip a tract into the middle of the work’ (Finkelstein 1995: 342) by detailing the ‘“injustice, suffering, insult, and, worst of all, defeat”’ (Reade 1877: vol. 2, 14) suffered by these pioneering women. Indeed, Jex-­Blake wrote in 1893 that ‘in spite of a few minor errors that an outsider could hardly avoid’, Reade’s novel ‘may take and keep its place in contemporary history in virtue of its great general accuracy’ (1893: 261). Much of the Victorian public thus derived its first impressions of the woman doctor from representations of Jex-­Blake not just through press debates but also through A Woman-­Hater. We encounter Rhoda first as she is starving, unable to buy herself food because of her lack of money. Having come to Europe to study medicine, Rhoda had abandoned her enrolments in Zurich and France

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when hearing news that ‘“one British school, Edinburgh, had shown symptoms of yielding to Continental civilisation, and relaxing mono­ poly”’ (Reade 1877: vol. 2, 12). After detailing the struggles of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Rhoda introduces Jex-­ Blake, the ‘“lion-­ hearted Englishwoman”’ who after being denied medical study at the University of London ‘“sat down to besiege Edinburgh”’ (vol. 2, 27–8). Rhoda paints a picture of the Surgeons’ Hall Riot in November 1870: ‘A band of medical students . . . got the gates closed, and collected round them. We came up, one after another, and were received with hisses, groans, and abusive epithets. . . . [T]he ruffians who had undertaken to teach us modesty . . . dragged a sheep into the lecture-­room, lighted pipes, produced bottles, drank, smoked, and abused us ladies to our faces, and interrupted the lecturer at intervals with their howls and ribaldry; that was intended to show the professor he should not be listened to any more if he admitted the female students.’ (vol. 2, 57–8)

Shortly after this scene, Rhoda returns to France to receive her diploma, but still cannot practice in Britain as she would like. Although universities later opened their doors to women, the prejudices against and debates around female doctors persisted. The number of women doctors in Britain steadily increased in the late nineteenth century: there were 8 in 1871, 25 in 1881, 101 in 1891, and 212 in 1901 (Smith 1979: 382). In 1894 the British Medical Journal states that ‘it is almost as easy at this moment for a woman to get a complete medical education in England, Scotland, or Ireland as it is for a man’: universities and colleges admit female students, there are about fifty medical women practising in London and ‘gradually winning public confidence’, several medical charities are run entirely by women, and there is the New Hospital for Women in London which contains forty-­two beds in addition to a maximum of thirty outpatients a day (‘Medical Education of Women’ 1894: 490). However, as Gregg notes, while the British public at the end of the 1890s are more welcoming to women doctors, and many approve of having women doctors dispatched to colonial India to work there, not as many would agree to ‘consulting a lady doctor for your own ailments, or welcoming her as one of your family’ (1898: 109). With this background, literary figurations of female and New Woman doctors gain a specific significance; they become part of both a medical and public debate. While early women doctors were definitely pursuing an unconventional career, some critics have argued that ‘they were far from being “New” in the ways that notable – or notorious – New Women like Sarah Grand or Olive Schreiner were’, suggesting that the involvement of these middle-­class women in a project to ‘overturn the social order’ was rather

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an ‘unintended byproduct of a dedication to preserving it’ (Farkas 2011: 142). It is true that female medical students had to be women of some means, in order to pay the school fees. However, for female doctors like Jex-­Blake, the struggle for women’s rights – this overturning of the social order – and their entry into higher education went hand in hand. Indeed, these first years of struggle to enter medical study and practice have been characterised as ‘inextricably bound up with the rise of feminism and the suffrage movement’, as the entry into previously male-­defined professions was seen as an aspect of women’s claim to citizenship and had strong support from many women’s organisations (Pringle 1998: 27). As Susan Kingsley Kent notes, female doctors played a crucial role in the fight for suffrage, becoming ‘a source of scientific legitimacy’ as they sought a ‘redefinition of sexual identity for women that would justify their political inclusion’ (1990: 119). The struggle for women’s entry into medical study and higher education in some respects became synonymous with the wider struggle for women’s rights. Figurations of women doctors work from and against Reade’s A Woman-­Hater, elaborating upon some of the issues described therein as well as raising new ones. Like the New Woman figure as a whole, the New Woman doctor is a complex literary figure, caught up in late nineteenth-­century discourses of sexual difference, race, class, eugenics and imperialism. As some of these writers demonstrate, Carol-­Ann Farkas notes, the late Victorian medical woman’s success ‘owed much to her ability to reconcile – or conflate – her feminist goals with the teachings of empirical science, essentialist notions about sexual identity, and anxieties of popular racialist sentiment’ (2011: 161). While many New Woman doctor novels espouse sometimes contradictory views on women’s emancipation and gender roles, they almost all engage in discussions on two specific topics: the supposed ‘unsexing’ effect of medical work, and the supposed incompatibility of medicine and marriage. Together with the notion promoted by leading late nineteenth-­century physiologists that women were physically and mentally unfit for medical study and work, these are two of the most commonly cited objections to women’s entry into the medical profession. While in the latter years of the nineteenth century the figure of the New Woman became synonymous with the struggle for female emancipation, and the female doctor became subsumed within this figure, women doctors in literary works are not always characterised as New Woman doctors. Some of the early works following A Woman-­Hater might perhaps be better defined as woman doctor texts, rather than as New Woman doctor texts, some having more in common with the genre of sensation fiction, and many of them placing a romance or m ­ arriage

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plot rather than medical work at their core. In Charlotte Yonge’s Magnum Bonum; or, Mother Carey’s Brood (1879), for example, Janet Carey pursues medical training in Germany before returning to Britain, where she abandons medicine to get married, and later on ends up as a nurse. The later Dr. Hermione: A Novel (1890), by Henry Curwen, similarly features a female doctor who abandons her practice to get married. While George Gardiner Alexander’s Doctor Victoria: A Picture from the Period (1881) features a self-­sacrificing female doctor devoted to her profession rather than to marriage (although this path is chosen for complex reasons), Jex-­Blake dismisses the novel as ‘evidently made by a writer who knows nothing of the daily details of medical study or practice’ (1893: 264). Some woman doctor figurations, like the doctor in Naden’s poem quoted at the start of this chapter, begin with ‘disappointment’ in love, ‘which most masculine minds seem to consider the essential preliminary to the study of medicine by a woman’ (Jex-­Blake 1893: 265): the heroines of Doctor Victoria and the later Elizabeth Glen, M.B. (1895) both share this plot device. Other do describe medical work, but, again, end in marriage, such as the anonymously published (later ascribed to Anne Elliot) Dr. Edith Romney (1883). This novel can in some ways be seen as a precursor to Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’ (1894), in its focus on rivalry and love between two country doctors of different sex – both also end in marriage proposals (although with differing outcomes). While women doctors were often accused of being ‘unwomanly’, Wilkie Collins’s short story ‘Fie! Fie! the Fair Physician’ (1882) suggests the opposite: a beautiful and charming female doctor who, rather than being unladylike, instead uses her charm to obtain more male patients. This fear of women doctors luring in male patients is shown already in an 1865 satirical cartoon in Punch, or the London Charivari entitled ‘Lady-­Physicians’. In this picture we see a fair lady physician taking the pulse of ‘young Reginald the Bracks’, who looks admiringly at his doctor. This young man has ‘succeeded in Catching a Bad Cold, in order that he might Send for that rising Practitioner, Dr. Arabella Bolus!’ (‘Lady-­Physicians’ 1865: 244). A similar critique of potential unprofessional behaviour in female doctors is seen in L. T. Meade’s novel The Medicine Lady (1892), in the actions of Cecilia Harvey, a nurse who gives up practice when getting married but who takes over her doctor husband’s work when he dies. As Jex-­ Blake notes in her review of woman doctor novels, The Medicine Lady does not strictly belong to the genre but rather portrays a ‘woman-­quack’ (1893: 268). Having found a recipe made by her husband for a possible cure for consumption, Cecilia distributes the medicine to her own child and to people living in the

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local slums. While the medicine seems to work on some of the patients, it makes other patients even worse, leading Cecilia to destroy the recipe while exclaiming that God ‘“does not wish me to use the cure. He says it is too mighty for me. I have stolen it from scientific men. I am an ignorant woman, and I must not try it any more”’ (Meade 1892: 252). As Christopher Pittard notes, this exclamation at the end of the novel, and the unhappy ending, can easily be read as a statement that women are not suited to medical practice (2011: 151) – echoing the opinions of various medical men of the time. Another female doctor who specifically uses her ‘womanly’ charms in her profession – but for good causes rather than immoral ones – is the heroine of Annie S. Swan’s Elizabeth Glen, M.B.: The Experiences of a Lady Doctor (1895), a novel first published in 1894 in the magazine The Woman at Home. As if determined to make the point that female doctors are not necessarily ‘unsexed’ or masculine, the narrator repeatedly insists on Dr Elizabeth’s ‘womanliness’. Already on the first pages of the novel, Dr Elizabeth’s study is described as a ‘little cosy, womanly room’ and as a ‘woman’s room’ (1895: 1–2), and the doctor herself is introduced as ‘a woman of so large a heart and so wide an experience that . . . wifehood and motherhood could scarcely improve her in that respect’ (2). Once the doctor actually enters the room, she is presented as a ‘perfect combination of womanliness and strength . . . beautiful, womanly, lovable exceedingly’ (4). While we later encounter Dr Elizabeth’s medical skills, including glimpses of her uses of modern medical instruments, and hear tales of prejudice against women doctors, hardly a page goes by without a mention of the doctor’s ‘womanliness’. Elizabeth herself often equates her ‘womanly’ character with unprofessional behaviour: already in the first chapter she sheds some ‘very unprofessional tears’ (12) when lacking patients, her first patient’s misfortune touches her ‘in a very unprofessional part’ (16), and she quizzes this same patient ‘with a curiosity natural and womanly, though quite unprofessional’ (23). This unprofessional womanliness is not all bad, however, as it brings her closer to her patients. The novel ends with our heroine’s betrothal to her childhood sweetheart, who although previously having thought it ‘intolerable’ to think of Elizabeth ‘subjected to experiences which will rob [her] of that exquisite womanliness’ (299) now has accepted her profession. However, marriage and a medical practice cannot be combined in this novel, and Elizabeth Glen, M.B. ‘is no more’ (312). Most fittingly, the sequel to the first novel is thus entitled Mrs. Keith Hamilton, M.B.: More experiences of Elizabeth Glen (1897), taking its name from Elizabeth’s husband and leaving the heroine to be defined primarily by her marriage.

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Two 1897 novels stand out among the ones mentioned above, in their simultaneous focus on both romance and medical practice, and the suggestion that the two can be combined. Both Sweethearts and Friends: A Story of the Seventies by Maxwell Gray (pen name for Mary Gleed Tuttiett) and Peace with Honour by Hilda Gregg present main characters devoted to their medical careers and scientific enquiry, but also interested in love. Sweethearts and Friends was first serialised in five instalments in the young women’s magazine Atalanta in 1896–7. Set in the 1870s, the novel depicts Amy Langton’s path toward becoming a doctor. Amy has had a ‘leaning towards science’ since she was a child, when she had ‘cut open bellows to see where the wind came from, and worried her elders for a reason for everything’ (1897: 39–40). As a young woman she studies anatomy and geology in her spare time, as well as chemistry and physiology, keeping a human skull under her pillow so as to hide her unsuitable interests. Not only does Amy become a doctor, in time holding a prestigious position in a London women’s hospital, but she also shows an unrelenting scientific interest (collecting flora even while on the Riviera), and engages in politics including the suffrage question. One of Gray’s characters laments Amy’s marriage prospects, as her interests can hardly appeal to men: ‘“What can she talk of? What can she do? She has no time to learn tennis” – then new; golf was scarcely known out of Scotland, ladies’ cricket and bicycling still in the womb of time – “She reads no novels but old ones” – Ibsen was then unknown, Zola young – ’ (204). The narrator’s interjection here seems to suggest that, had Amy been born a few decades later, she would have become one of those bicycling, Ibsen-­reading New Women. The novel ends as Dr Amy saves an admirer from a burning house, after which she consents to marry him. Unlike the majority of woman doctor novels, marriage and medicine are not incompatible: Amy’s husband not only accepts her profession but promises to help his wife ‘to reconcile her wifely and professional duties, and to further the improvement of her sex’ (284). Gregg’s Peace with Honour (published under the pseudonym Sidney Grier) from the same year similarly suggests a possible co-­existence of marriage and a medical career. In this novel, Dr Georgia Keeling and her future husband Major Dick North embark on a small diplomatic mission to Ethiopia to establish a British trade alliance, and there she comes to treat both the natives and the British colonisers. While the use of modern technologies in many literary texts comes to stand for the professionalism of the female doctor, in Peace with Honour the skill of the British woman doctor also comes to justify not just a British presence in Ethiopia but also the larger imperial project. Georgia carries

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a medical kit containing chloroform, sanitary bandages and various polished surgical instruments, appliances ‘such as had never been seen in Ethiopia before’ (1897: 359), which she uses when performing surgery on a young native woman, and thereby saving her: ‘[t]he splinter was extracted and the broken bone set, after which the wound was carefully dressed’ (359). Her clean instruments stand out against the ‘mass of dirty rags’ (355) initially covering the wounded foot, as her Western medicine stands out against the workings of the local ‘witch doctor’ Khadija. The novel thus expresses a ‘dual commitment’ (Swenson 2005: 182) to both women’s emancipation and empire, combining protofeminism with a white supremacist and imperialist mission, through describing the territory in question as in need of British colonisation. While Major North starts out as an opponent of women doctors, he agrees to let Georgia continue her work when married – as long as this work is restricted to ‘“doctoring the women and children”’ (401) rather than male patients. To Georgia’s mind, this arrangement would set ‘“such a good example to the Ethiopian women”’ by showing the supposed superiority of an English marriage over the local customs. Most woman doctor novels depict the novelty of female practitioners at the time, the prejudices that they had to face, and in some cases how such prejudices were fought or overcome. While these texts vary in approach and style, they all tend to explore the two most common themes of the genre: the fear of the ‘unsexed’ woman doctor, and the romance or marriage plot. The unsexed woman doctor: Dr Janet of Harley Street (1893) The label of being ‘mannish’, ‘masculine’ or ‘unsexed’ was a common invective for any woman who threatened the established gender norms at the end of the nineteenth century, with the popular press satirising women who were in any way either physically or mentally active as becoming ‘unwomanly’. We see this idea in the 1895 satiric poem ‘Sexomania’ published in Punch, or the London Charivari, already discussed in Chapter 3, about women who are physically active. In this poem women, through ‘Bicycling, footballing, scarce human’, might actually become the other sex: ‘To-­morrow there may be no sexes!’, the poem warns. While any woman threatening established gender norms could be called ‘unsexed’ or ‘mannish’, medicine proved one of the most daring professions for New Woman to enter. As Kristine Swenson notes in Medical Women and Victorian Fiction, and as seen in debates regarding women in higher education, critics of the woman doctor argued that her medical knowledge would ‘unsex’ her or make her a ‘neuter’,

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‘biologically incapable of the conventional womanly duties of marriage and motherhood’ (2005: 7). Medical study would, it was argued, harm women’s health, particularly their reproductive health or imagined ‘feminine delicacy’. Women were warned against thus becoming ‘unsexed’ through physical and mental exercise, and particularly through studying and practising medicine. Many literary female doctors are thus also termed ‘unsexed’, ‘masculine’ or are seen as in other ways posing a threat to established gendered relations. An 1892 cartoon published in Punch, or the London Charivari presents this notion of the woman doctor becoming ‘masculine’ or unladylike (Figure 5.1). The cartoon’s heading, ‘When pain and anguish wring the brow’, taken from Walter Scott’s Marmion (1808) which describes women as ‘ministering angel[s]’, becomes satirical as the female doctor (‘“Dr Elizabeth Squills”’) is characterised as not being ‘“so leddylike as some of our ain men doctors!”’ The female doctor has thus become so ‘unwomanly’ that even her male colleagues are more ‘ladylike’ than she. The fear of the female doctor becoming ‘unsexed’ is noted already by Reade in A Woman-­Hater, as Rhoda recounts the struggles in Edinburgh. She quotes a speaker who, armed with nineteenth-­century physiological theories, claimed that medical study for women would

Figure 5.1  ‘When pain and anguish wring the brow’, Punch, or the London Charivari (21 May 1892). Wellcome Library.

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‘“impair her delicacy . . . she could not qualify for medicine without mastering anatomy and surgery, branches that must unsex her”’ (vol. 2, 33). Rhoda goes on to quote a newspaper which claimed that ‘“aspirants to medicine and surgery desire to rid themselves speedily and effectually of that modesty which nature has planted in women”’ (vol. 2, 54). Both these quotes specifically mention the study of anatomy and surgery as the main causes for women becoming ‘unsexed’ or having their ‘delicacy’ impaired, a notion which recurs in several New Woman doctor works. As medical students these women would have to see and perform dissection, potentially on male subjects, which to critics of the woman doctor seemed unthinkable. The idea of the woman doctor as an ‘unsexed’ creature or as a ‘neuter’ is explored in Arabella Kenealy’s (1859–1938) Dr Janet of Harley Street (1893). Dr Janet Doyle, the doctor of the novel’s title, is first introduced to the reader through her ‘deep, cheery voice’ (1894: 85) which suggests its source as masculine. However, the masculine figure is indeed a woman: ‘She’ – for the deep voice issued from a feminine frame, if, indeed, one may so style the stalwart shapelessness of Dr. Janet Doyle – was the senior physician of the ‘Minerva Hospital for Women,’ dean of the women’s school attached thereto, and lecturer in the several colleges which admitted women to their privileges. (86)

Clad in a ‘rough, loosely-­fitting tweed garb’ consisting of a ‘divided’ skirt, and a bodice ‘made and worn after the fashion of a man’s shooting-­ coat’ (86), Dr Janet can here first only be addressed as ‘she’ in quotation marks. Her ample height and figure are coupled with dark skin, a ‘large and massive’ forehead and a ‘broad and resolute’ chin, ‘strong’ lips and large hands (87), which altogether give her a certain ‘masculine’ appearance. Indeed, studying to become a doctor, according to Dr Janet, must entail a lessening of external womanly beauty: ‘“five years’ head-­work tones a woman’s looks down. Close study takes the iron out of her blood, and spoils her complexion; cramming her brain thins and fades her hair; stooping for ever over books ruins her figure”’ (99). As seen in the ‘Lady Doctor’ of Constance Naden’s poem, who is a ‘spinster gaunt and grey’ ‘with ‘[a]ll female graces slighting’ (81, 84), a female doctor’s appearance must apparently deteriorate through years of learning. As part of a larger eugenicist argument (shared with the novel’s author), Dr Janet argues that because of the degenerative times in which they live, there have been detected not two sexes, but three: ‘“masculine, feminine and neuter”’ (123). She gives herself as an example to prove her theory:

148    Gender, Technology and the New Woman ‘Will anyone kindly observe me carefully and disinterestedly, and tell me if there is anything distinctly womanly in my appearance ? . . . I tell you, with but a few exceptions, there is not a man in the room as muscular, rational and energetic – in a word, what you call masculine – as I.’ (123–4)

While Swenson considers Dr Janet as a ‘strong and successful’ woman in a New Woman novel, a character who ‘rescues young women from manipulative husbands’ and details her ‘feminist theories of sexuality’ at dinner parties (8), might not her eugenicist theories instead work against the New Woman doctor’s argument for access to higher education and for professional respect? Matter-­of-­factly asserting her status as a neuter or ‘unsexed’ creature, Dr Janet does not endorse the current direction of humankind, rather she sees it as a degenerative force: the lower humans are on the scale of evolution, she states, ‘“the less difference is there between the sexes”’ (124). She thus condemns rather than champions the blurring of boundaries between the genders: ‘How many women now-­a-­days have any of the instincts for home, and wife, and motherhood, which are the crown of their lovely sex ? No! believe me, those of us who are not distinctly masculine are feminine, but very few are womanly. . . . You men of to-­day,’ she went on, ‘are as neuter as we.’ (125–6)

Modern civilisation, Dr Janet declares along with Nordau in Degeneration (1892) and the degenerationists, causes ‘“devolution and the production of neuters”’ (126) due to its artificial modes of life and thought. Indeed, Nordau argues that physicians are the ones most fitted for discovering degeneration in individuals, as they note the degenerate’s mental and physical traits; the medical man immediately recognises ‘at a glance . . . degeneration (degeneracy) and hysteria’ (1993: 15). For most women, Kenealy argues, too much mental and physical exercise destroys the supposed sex binary and thus degenerates the human race. Janet’s words may sound familiar, as they echo those of the opponents of the movement for women doctors. The above ­mentioned Charles West in Medical Women: A Statement and an Argument (1878) indeed suggests that campaigners for women’s entry into the medical profession are ‘imitating the example set in the republic of the ants and the bees, where the workers are neuters, or, as naturalists tell us, imperfectly developed females’ (1878: 28, emphasis added). Co-­education of the sexes cannot be permitted, as it would ‘confound man and woman by the production of a tertium quid [‘third thing’] without the distinctive peculiarities of either’ (West 1878: 28); in the words of popular fears of the day, mixed medical studies would ‘unsex’ or even create a ‘third sex’ among the students.

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While Swenson characterises Dr Janet as a New Woman novel because of its concerns with woman’s ‘nature’ and sexuality, and its questioning of gender roles (2005: 150), the novel’s female doctor character presents a specific type of eugenicist argument potentially contradicting the New Woman’s call for independence. Declaring that women of the time must get over their ‘“folly of apeing men”’ (133), Dr Janet criticises women who cut their hair or wear unseemly clothes, or who engage in physical exercise such as bicycling: ‘“Because they have now a liberty approaching that of the other sex, they know no better what to do with it, than to weakly imitate their quondam masters, making fools of themselves, bicycling, cricketing and footballing”’ (134). Indeed, Dr Janet declares, the New Woman ‘amazon’ is a ‘monstrosity’, a ‘distortion’ of the race, and the idea that it is ‘“finer to be crack batters or bicyclers than to be good women”’ is more reminiscent of a ‘“brain tumour”’ than of healthy brain development (135–6). However, despite Dr Janet’s ‘anathemas against unsexing’ (136), she insists upon her protégé and medical student Phyllis assuming the surname of Adam, as opposed to her original surname Eve, and jestily refers to her as ‘“Phyl, my boy”’ (113). While Dr Janet’s views are familiar to those shared by critics of the New Woman and of female doctors, in other female or New Woman doctor novels such criticisms usually come from conservative male characters rather than the female doctor herself. In Gregg’s Peace with Honour, for instance, Major North equates everything that is wrong with the New Woman with female doctors. Echoing many critics of women doctors, the Major argues that ‘“[t]hese lady doctors are not womanly”’, and that they become ‘spoilt by [their] medical training’ (1897: 12, 29). Just as Phyllis Eve is given the surname Adam by her mentor in Dr Janet, Georgia in Peace with Honour is familiarly known as ‘Georgie’, and during her medical studies cuts her hair short so that she, in a photo of the time, looks ‘like a very nice boy’ (16). In Ethiopia, Georgia is at times mistaken for a man because of her clothing and bearing, specifically the ‘resemblance between the open coat and cotton blouse which Georgia wore with her riding-­skirt, and a man’s dress-­coat and shirt-­front’ (354). However, unlike in Dr Janet, this critique of ‘unwomanly’ women comes from a conservative suitor rather than from the woman doctor herself. Despite her critique of the ‘neuterdom’ of the late nineteenth century, Dr Janet advocates for the necessity of female doctors – with the stipulation that not all women are suited to medicine, but rather only ‘neuter’ women should take up the profession. She scolds her male colleagues for their sole focus on physical (rather than also mental) solutions to medicine, arguing that women, with their emotional natures (even

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among woman-­neuters, it seems), add a much-­needed element to the otherwise ‘“materialistic science”’ (142) of the profession. Dr Janet’s argument here is similar to that of Jex-­Blake, who states in ‘Medicine as a Profession for Women’ (1872) that women ‘are naturally inclined and fitted for medical practice’, calling doctoring a ‘peculiarly womanly work’ (1872: 8, 23). As Farkas notes, many supporters argued that the woman doctor was not just as competent as her male colleague, but was in fact more competent when it came to treating the ‘emotional and moral health’ of the patient (2011: 153). However, Kenealy is alone in insisting on the pseudoscientific evolutionary category of ‘neuters’ to be included in the equation. While Kenealy’s novel makes a case for the necessity of an unsexed ‘neuter’ woman doctor, most arguments for women doctors focus on the female doctor’s womanliness, so as to avoid critiques of the profession’s ‘unsexing’ potential. Instead they argue for the necessity of women doctors to treat women and children, both because women practitioners might be more ‘womanly’, and in order to preserve the ‘delicacy’ of the patients. Reade’s A Woman-­Hater ends with the specific plea that women doctors be allowed so that female patients should have the ‘right to take their secret ailments to a skilled physician of their own sex’ rather than being ‘compelled to go, blushing, writhing, and, after all, concealing and fibbing, to a male physician’ (1877: vol. 3, 278). Jex-­ Blake similarly argues that ‘very many women’ have wished that they could be ‘medically attended by those of their own sex’, and that she knows of several cases where women have ‘habitually gone through one confinement after another without proper attendance, because the idea of employing a man was so extremely repugnant to them’ (1872: 38). As Jex-­Blake explains, this is because women patients might feel more at ease telling a female doctor about their problems, and being examined by a female doctor, especially concerning cases specifically associated with women, such as issues of pregnancy and childbirth. Many early women doctors, including literary ones, thus insisted that they would treat only female patients. While Dr Janet of Harley Street lays out some of the fin de siècle fears around degeneration and ‘sexual anarchy’ as embodied in the figure of the female or New Woman doctor, and ultimately seems to support the account of emancipated women as ‘unsexed’, two other works of the time take a different approach. Rather than unwillingly arguing for the necessity of women being ‘unsexed’ for medicine’s cause, as Kenealy does, Margaret Todd in Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1892) and Arthur Conan Doyle in ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’ (1894) prove that the New Woman doctor does not have to be ‘unwomanly’ or ‘unsexed’, but

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can retain her ‘womanliness’ while also being educated and experienced in the newest modern medical theories and practices – most importantly including a knowledge of modern scientific theories and technologies. The New Woman doctor in these two works might not have to be that unsexed ‘neuter’ (Kenealy 1893: 123) or ‘uninteresting hybrid’ (Todd 1894: 16) prescribed by much contemporary discourse. Medicine and marriage: Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1892) Glasgow-­born Margaret Todd (1859–1918) studied under Jex-­Blake at the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, where she was one of the first eight students when the school opened in 1886. She was thus intimately acquainted with the struggle for women’s entry into the medical profession, and the prejudices faced by early female doctors. Despite the relative success of her debut novel, and her partnership with and biography of Jex-­Blake, Todd is not well known today.3 In 1892 Todd published her three-­ volume novel Mona Maclean, Medical Student under the pseudonym ‘Graham Travers’. While Todd published six works of fiction in her career, none of these proved as big a success as her debut. The work was well received, and went into further editions; in a second edition of Todd’s short story collection Fellow Travellers, published four years after the debut novel, Mona Maclean is advertised as being in its eleventh edition (Todd 1896: 347). In the ‘Press Opinions’ of the novel given here, The Spectator names Mona Maclean ‘the cleverest novel we have read for a long time’, whereas the Daily Telegraph calls it ‘distinctly an up-­to-­date novel’, and Black and White similarly associates the main character Mona with the newnesses of the time in characterising her as ‘a strongly marked modern type’ (Todd 1896: 347). The Bookman calls the novel a ‘clever story’, suggesting that ‘[p]erhaps nowhere else are so compactly expressed the ideals and points of view, the enthusiasm and heroisms of the young women who are to-­day knocking at the doors of the professions. . . . It should upset a whole cargo of antiquated ideas about blue spectacles and blue stockings’ (‘Mona Maclean, Medical Student’ 1893: 59). The reviews are overwhelmingly positive: The Spectator lauds the novel’s ‘ingenious plot . . . cleverly carried out’ and marks it as ‘one of the freshest and brightest novels of the time’ (Wallace 1892: 504), while The Englishwoman’s Review considers the novel ‘all thoroughly interesting and moreover wholesome’ (‘Reviews: Mona Maclean, medical student’ 1893: 55), and The Graphic congratulates the author on ‘an exceptionally promising débût’ (‘New Novels: “Mona Maclean, Medical Student”’ 1892: 26).

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However, Gregg mentions a reviewer denouncing the novel as ‘“the hysterical work of a sentimental female,” or words to that effect’ (1898: 108), while the Daily News more meekly states that it ‘is not by any means a very good novel’ (‘Lady Medical Students’ 1892: 5). Narrating the trials of a young female medical student, Mona Maclean partakes in the debates around female doctors at the end of the nineteenth century. This focus is remarked upon by the Spectator reviewer, who notes that the novel ‘is not only based on, but is full of, this “female medical” movement’ (Wallace 1892: 504). Oliver Lovesey characterises the novel as simultaneously a ‘roman à these, a novel with a didactic purpose’ – the purpose being advocating for the acceptance of women doctors – and a novel of education or initiation, a ‘romance in the guise of a realist novel and a female Bildungsroman’ (2011: 5–6). The novel counters some of the prejudices against female doctors, including the notions that medical study and practice would ‘unsex’ women or make them less womanly, that women lacked the capacity for the physical and intellectual labour involved and that marriage and medicine could not be combined. Having failed her exams at the London School of Medicine for Women, the orphan Mona Maclean takes a six-­month break from her medical studies to stay with a cousin in the fictional Scottish village of Borrowness. Mona’s position as an orphan – so common among New Woman heroines – is, as Christine Thompson points out, central to the narrative, as it allows Todd to avoid ‘any serious ambivalence about parental opposition’ (1991: 189) to Mona’s career choice. In Borrowness Mona assists her rather conservative cousin in the running of a shop, promising not to tell anyone that she is a medical student, in case it would be considered too scandalous. While in Borrowness Mona explores her heritage, walking in the footsteps of her Scottish father and hearing tales about him from some of the neighbours. She also keeps up her scientific interests, spending much time studying the botany of the area, at one point collecting plants in the company of ‘a scientist of European celebrity’ (124) who happens to be visiting. During her stay in Scotland Mona makes a new acquaintance, the medical student Dr Dudley, who later on becomes her husband and colleague. Throughout the novel Mona counters stereotypes and fears attributed to women becoming doctors. Mona’s relative Sir Douglas provides examples of the prejudices of the time when he states his opinion regarding the unsuitability of women doctors. Before meeting Mona, Sir Douglas had regarded the female doctor as an anomaly in his ‘collection’ of types of women: ‘The genus Medical Woman was not as yet included in his collection, but he had heard of it, and had classified it in his own

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mind as an useful but uninteresting hybrid, which could not strictly be called a woman at all’ (16). As noted earlier, both the popular press and many doctors satirised women who were physically or mentally active as becoming ‘unsexed’, ‘unwomanly’ or ‘neuters’ as Dr Janet of Kenealy’s novel would have it. Sir Douglas asks Mona if she engages in the ‘human butchery’ that is dissection, which Mona confirms but declines to see it as human butchery. However, Todd writes: [A] sense of hopelessness came upon her, as she realised how she was handicapped in this discussion. She must either be silent or speak in an unknown tongue. How could she explain to this man the wonder and the beauty of the work that he dismissed in a brutal phrase? How could she talk of that ever-­ new field for observation, corroboration, and discovery; that unlimited scope for the keen eye, the skilful hand, the thinking brain, the mature judgment? (22)

Todd in her novel highlights the difficult position of the female doctor in the late nineteenth century: Mona does not dare confess her love for her profession – especially dissection – for fear of being misunderstood. As Thompson notes, while critics of female doctors often cited the supposed lack of physical and mental strength as a reason, the study by women of anatomy and dissection seemed the most upsetting part: ‘Anatomical secrets in particular were considered the prerogative of men, and the women who desired to share them were regarded with suspicion and distaste’ (1991: 182). In response to Charles West’s question in 1878 – ‘Will the beauty of womanhood, distinct and widely different as it is from that of manhood, be increased; or will it be lessened by those new studies . . . ?’ (1878: 8) – Sir Douglas has a definite reply. Because to Sir Douglas’s mind, a woman who dissects must surely, he suggests, ‘lose[s] everything that makes womanhood fair and attractive’, must surely become ‘hard and blunted’ (21). Mona’s specific love for dissection and anatomy is noteworthy, particularly as this was considered the part of medical training most damaging to the doctress’s ‘womanliness’. Mona is especially interested in the scientific side of her education and future career, enjoying and excelling in dissection above other subjects. In the chapter ‘The Dissecting-­Room’, a fellow student of Mona recalls one such instance: ‘“I shall never forget the day when I asked her to show me the nerve to the vastus externus on her own dissection. She drew aside a muscle with hooks, and opened up a complicated system of telephone wires that made my hair stand on end”’ (367). Indeed, her fellow students explain Mona’s failure on the Intermediate exam as a result of her spirit of scientific enquiry, which is not served well by the nature of medical examination: she ‘“is too good a student . . . she has a spirit of genuine scientific research”’ (367).

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In her Final Examinations Mona wins first class and gold medal not in Anatomy but in Physiology, the branch of science most dependent upon dissection and, as Sparks suggests (2009: 155), by extension also vivisection. While nineteenth-­century women’s rights campaigners were often identified with the antivivisection movement, Mona in Todd’s novel defends the practice as necessary to the scientific progress of medicine, declaring that an expert in physiology ‘must live in the midst of the growing science’ (191). Mona’s love for dissection and anatomical work can be constrasted with the confusion and disgust that Phyllis Eve, the medical student of Dr Janet, feels. Phyllis struggles to understand that ‘jumble of tiresome terms [that] seemed the jargon of anatomy’, that ‘marvel of verbose detail . . . what a boundless bewilderment and confusion it all was’ (129–30). She also has difficulties carrying out the physical aspect of the work: while the ‘first horror’ of her anatomical investigations diminishes in time, Phyllis ‘never overcame her distaste for the dissecting room’ and would never lose, ‘in scientific fervour’, her sense of sympathy for the subjects (130–1). Indeed, Phyllis’s disinterest in her studies causes some of her companions to advise Dr Janet that her protégé ‘“will never make a doctor . . . she will never think as men do and be essentially scientific”’ (133). With her feminine mind, Phyllis is unsuited for medical study and practice. Mona in Mona Maclean, on the other hand, delights in her scientific endeavours. In the chapter entitled ‘A Clinical Report’ we catch a glimpse of Mona’s enthusiasm, as she asks a friend to give her a ‘full, particular, and scientific account’ of the same friend’s rheumatism (192). After a discussion regarding prescriptions and the workings of morphine, Lucy remarks upon her friend’s never-­ending scientific curiosity: ‘“I leave it to you, dear, to cultivate the infant bacillus on a nice little nutrient jelly, and then polish him off with a dilute solution of salicin”’ (194). Probably referring to passages such as these, Jex-­Blake characterises Mona Maclean as a novel manifestly written ‘from the inside’, that is to say by an author acquainted with actual medical training and practice. Indeed, Jex-­Blake states, ‘the professional touch is unmistakable’ (1893: 268–9). The Daily News review specifically notes the novel’s use of scientific terms: ‘young women talk about “the foramina running into the spheno-­maxillary fossa”, and about “the plantar arch”, but the words might be Hittite or Etruscan for all that the novel-­reader knows or cares’ (‘Lady Medical Students’ 1892: 5). Once Mona returns to her medical studies, she is immediately caught up in a spirit of scientific enquiry when asked to help her colleague’s dissection: ‘She took the forceps in her hand, and in a moment the old enthusiasm came back. “How very interesting!” she said. “Look at this deep epigastric”’ (370).

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Despite her love for the scientific and anatomical side of medicine, Mona manages to escape the commonly perceived ‘unsexing’ of the woman doctor, by adhering to stereotypical ideas of femininity – such as being interested in fashion and appearances. One of the reviews of the novel concedes this fact: ‘If Mona Maclean had ever been like the unvarnished young men . . . she would have been a very disagreeable heroine. But she is pretty, and well dressed, and has quantities of German poetry at her fingers’ ends’ (‘Lady Medical Students’ 1892: 5). Similarly, noting the ‘pretty’ and ‘graceful’ nature of Mona, another review remarks that the novel is ‘evidently written to show . . . that feminine fascination is quite compatible with the study of medicine’ (‘Four New Novels’ 1892: 6). As Mona’s friend tells her at the outset of the novel, as a female doctor ‘the art of dressing one’s hair is at least as important as the art of dissecting’ (1). Mona repeatedly throughout the novel refers to her love of dainty dresses and clothes shops, something which surprises her aunt, who tells her husband: ‘“[Y]ou have no idea of the heresies Mona has been confessing. She cares as much about new gowns and bonnets as anybody.”’ Indeed, Mona enjoys shops and shop-­windows, and likes ‘“pretty bonnets too, and tea-­gowns and laces and note-­paper and – every kind of arrant frivolity and bagatelle”’ (19). The female doctor is here emphasised as being still ‘womanly’ enough to care about her dress and appearance. After his cross-­examination of Mona, Sir Douglas admits that, despite her exposure to the ‘horrors’ of the dissection room, there is ‘“not a trace that is not perfectly womanly”’ (21) in Mona’s face. Mona is furthermore capable of allaying Sir Douglas’s fears by her intention to treat only women patients. Sir Douglas even admits that ‘“[t]here is a terrible necessity for them [women doctors] – terrible – and yet, what a sacrifice! . . . It makes me mad to think how a woman can allow herself to be pulled about by a man”’ (20). As in Kenealy’s Dr Janet, there is a distinct need for female doctors. However, while for Kenealy this need corresponds to the essentialist idea that women doctors might provide less ‘materialist’ or more ‘womanly’ care, for Todd their necessity comes primarily from the needs of female patients to access medical care without feeling ashamed. Having thus proved that medical study and practice need not necessarily ‘unsex’ the female doctor, the question regarding the perceived incompatibility of medicine and marriage persists. While the marriage debate of the late Victorian period may have reached its peak with the periodical and literary debates following Mona Caird’s insistence in 1888 that the present state of marriage was a ‘vexatious failure’ (1888: 197), the question of marriage for women doctors continued to be

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debated long after this. According to critics of the woman doctor, one could not have a career while also being a wife and a mother. As Tabitha Sparks notes, by the late nineteenth century the role of the doctor was ‘so strongly disassociated from the romantic and sentimental ethos of marriage’ that narratives about women doctors in fiction almost always ‘separate the stories of love from the stories of doctoring’ (2009: 137). Fiction writers, similarly, could at times imagine female doctors who are unmarried, and those who leave their careers for marriage, but they could not imagine ‘a female doctor who is also a wife’ (Sparks 2009: 137). This opinion is voiced already in Reade’s A Woman-­Hater, as Rhoda explains that she ‘“love[s] science as other women love men”’ (vol. 2, 110), making clear that the two are incompatible. The supposed incompatibility of a marital life and a medical career is similarly discussed in other contemporary works. Dr Janet in Kenealy’s novel argues that womanliness and marriage are incompatible with medical training and practice, and there is never any question of Phyllis practising medicine when she gets married. Phyllis’s husband-­to-­be declares that a woman like her ‘“is made for love and home and children. She isn’t meant for skeletons and pharmacopoeias”’ (143), and asks her to quit medicine and ‘“[l]eave it to the neuters”’ (174) – and so she does. Like other New Woman doctor novels of the time, Mona Maclean comments on the imagined conflict between medicine and marriage. Unusually, however, Mona marries but does not give up her medical practice, thus providing a ‘fascinating testament to the dominance of the pattern from which it emerges’ (Sparks 2009: 22). Instead of giving up her career, Mona sets up a practice in London with her husband Dudley. The last chapter of the novel is entitled ‘Partners’, and describes an incident from Mona’s and Dudley’s shared life and medical practice. Having just returned from their honeymoon, a dishevelled pregnant woman enters Dudley’s practice room, but Dudley sends the woman to Mona instead, telling his wife quietly: ‘“here is a case for you”’ (474), thus demonstrating the need for female doctors especially in gynaecological and obstetrical matters. While Thompson reads the marriage ending as a surrender to the late Victorian conventional marriage plot structure, arguing that ‘the new experience [Todd] wished to explore could fit only within the established conventions’ (1991: 193), it is worth emphasising the rarity of the conclusion – most woman doctor novels would end with the doctress choosing either marriage or her profession. Mona’s arrangement might be a nod to Garrett Anderson, who married but continued practising medicine. Garrett Anderson had written, in a letter to her sister in 1870 when getting engaged: ‘I am sure that the women [sic] question will never be solved in any complete way

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so long as marriage is thought to be incompatible with freedom and with an independent career and I do think that there is a very good chance that we may be able to do something to discourage the notion’ (qtd in Brock 2008: 333). At one point Mona compares her medical responsibilities to her marital duties, confirming to her husband that the two paths can be happily joined together: ‘“You see, dear, it’s a great responsibility to become a registered practitioner, and it’s a great responsibility to be married.”’ While admitting that ‘“the thought of undertaking the two responsibilities at once is simply appalling”’, Mona states that ‘“I am not afraid of feeling pulses and taking temperatures . . . nor even of putting your slippers to the fire”’ (464–5). This comparison of Mona’s provides a stark difference to other formulations of the marriage plot in doctoring novels, such as Rhoda’s exclamation in The Woman-­Hater that her love of science is comparable to other women’s romantic love. Unlike many other works of the time, Todd’s novel points to a negotiation of the role of the female doctor by emphasising her specific ‘womanliness’: a woman doctor can continue to practice medicine while being married, and enjoy dissection as well as dainty dresses. Gender and medical authority: ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’ (1894) In her 1898 review of woman doctor novels, Gregg remarks upon Todd’s description of a medical student’s work in Mona Maclean as characterised by ‘a minuteness which has hitherto only been approached by Dr Conan Doyle’ (1898: 108). Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), a doctor himself, had attended the University of Edinburgh from 1876 to 1881 as a medical student, starting just three years after the Edinburgh Seven had left. His medical short story ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’ (1894) thematises the novelty of the female doctor and the controversies provoked by the figure, demonstrating the equal – and sometimes superior – aptitude of women to enter the medical profession. In this depiction of the New Woman doctor it is not only the ‘womanliness’ of the female doctor that challenges the critiques against her, but also, crucially, her professionalism and its connection to modern science and technologies. These prove crucial to the reworking of gender roles in the medical profession, as a way of gaining authority for the female doctor. First published in The Idler in July 1894, with accompanying illustrations by A. S. Boyd, ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’ became part of the Round the Red Lamp collection when it was brought out in October the same year. Set in the village of Hoyland in the north of Hampshire, the story introduces the well-­established and unrivalled country practitioner Dr James Ripley, who prides himself above all on his professionalism and

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his up-­to-­date medical knowledge. He spends his leisure time reading medical journals: It was his ambition to keep his knowledge as fresh and bright as at the moment when he had stepped out of the examination hall. He prided himself on being able at a moment’s notice to rattle off the seven ramifications of some obscure artery, or to give the exact percentage of any physiological compound. (1894: 296)

When Ripley hears that another doctor – a ‘Verrinder Smith, M.D.’ – has set up practice in town, he is delighted to meet a like-­minded person with whom he might share his medical conversation. The double-­barrelled last name of the new doctor – perhaps a nod to the double-­barrelled last names of the two most famous female doctors of the day, Garrett Anderson and Jex-­Blake – does not reveal the bearer’s gender to Ripley, who assumes that his new colleague must be of the male sex. By consulting the current medical directory, Ripley learns that his new rival is ‘the holder of superb degrees, that he had studied with distinction at Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin and Vienna’, and furthermore that ‘he’ has been awarded a gold medal and the Lee Hopkins scholarship ‘for original research, in recognition of an exhaustive inquiry into the functions of the anterior spinal nerve roots’ (298). Ripley is bewildered by the record of ‘this brilliant neighbour’ and wonders ‘[w]hat on earth could so brilliant a man mean by putting up his plate in a little Hampshire hamlet’ (298–9). Ripley rejoices in making this new acquaintance and sets out to visit ‘him’. So unthinkable is it to Ripley that the other doctor of Hoyland might be a woman, that he mistakes Verrinder Smith for the wife of his new rival. When asking the ‘little woman’ facing him if her husband has gone out, he receives the reply that she is not married, and that ‘“I am Doctor Verrinder Smith”’, to which statement Ripley ‘was so surprised that he dropped his hat and forgot to pick it up again’: ‘“What!” he grasped [sic], “the Lee Hopkins prizeman! You!”’ (300). This moment is captured in one of the Idler illustrations, in which the male doctor stands open-­mouthed, with his hat dropped, staring at his female counterpart. Ripley, having never seen a woman doctor before, feels ‘his whole conservative soul rose up in revolt at the idea . . . as if a blasphemy had been committed’ (301). Very much affronted, he tells Verrinder Smith that he does not consider medicine ‘a suitable profession for women’ and that he has ‘a personal objection to masculine ladies’ (301), and shortly after makes for the door. Having thus learnt that the other doctor of Hoyland is a woman, Ripley cannot stop thinking of this ‘monstrous intrusion’ of a female doctor:

Medical New Women II: Doctors    159 A woman doctor had been an abstract thing before, repugnant but distant. Now she was there in actual practice, with a brass plate up just like his own, competing for the same patients. Not that he feared competition, but he objected to this lowering of his ideal of womanhood. . . . It revolted him the more to recall the details of her education. (304)

Like Sir Douglas in Todd’s novel, Ripley objects to women in medical practice, and soon starts referring to his rival as ‘[t]he unsexed woman’ (305) whenever she is mentioned. Facing criticism from various directions, female doctors had to negotiate an odd position as similarly sexed (a woman doctor) and ‘unsexed’ (a ‘masculine’ lady). Both female doctors such as Jex-­Blake and authors such as Todd refute the claim that medical women are somehow ‘unsexed’ through their study and profession. One other major way for early female doctors to gain respect and defend their professional status, and perhaps also to fight accusations of ‘unwomanliness’, was through the notion of professionalism; by proving one’s up-­ to-­ date scientific knowledge and one’s professional skill (Brock 2008: 323–4). As discussed in Chapter 4, modern medicine emerged with the birth of clinical medicine and hospital-­based learning for doctors, implicating new medical approaches based on physical examination, pathological anatomy and statistics. Medicine came to be organised by rules of empiricist and positivist science, and producing and legitimating medical authority and professionalism became dependent upon an idea of scientificity (Foucault 2007). As Claire Brock argues, in a time where physicians were still struggling to distance themselves from quacks and their pseudomedicine, professionalism was the most important quality in a doctor. Professionalism thus, Brock states, became the main way also for early female doctors to earn respect, a reputation, and patients (2008: 324–6). Beyond the interests of the individual patient, the notion of medical authority was at the time ‘fully embedded in social and political infrastructures’; as can be seen in the growth of medical offices in parishes, unions, factories and prisons, and in the advent of various public health reforms, projects and legal measures (Penner and Sparks 2015: 3). At the time of publication of Conan Doyle’s medical stories, female doctors had only recently been admitted to train in hospitals. As the story shows, the engagement with modern medical science and technologies becomes crucial to the recognition of the female doctor as bearing legitimate authority and skill; as being professional. We see this focus on scientificity and professionalism in ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’, as Verrinder Smith is depicted not only as having an extensive knowledge of modern medicine – demonstrated by her ‘superb degrees’, medals and ‘book-­case full of ponderous volumes in French

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and German’ (300) – but she is also an excellent practitioner, employing various modern medical devices and technologies. Verrinder Smith specifically proves her professional superiority and authority on modern medicine when criticising Ripley’s latest paper in the medical journal The Lancet, pointing out his lack of up-­to-­date references. She shows him a pamphlet of 1891 while he has been using one from 1890: ‘There was no denying that it completely knocked the bottom out of his own article. . . . She had showed herself to be his superior on his own pet subject’ (302–3). Ripley himself is forced to admit her authority. As noted in the previous chapter, modern clinical medicine takes shape in the form of new diagnostic devices, through new technologies and tools that help make medicine scientific in that they make possible the production of knowledge by relying on seeing, visibility and empiricism. Engaging with new medical technologies of the time becomes a way for female doctor in Conan Doyle’s story to gain respect. Already before he meets her, Ripley admires the modern medical devices that his rival keeps in her waiting room, proving that the new doctor in Hoyland must be a high-­standing one: ‘Elaborate instruments, seen more often in hospitals than in the houses of private practitioners, were scattered about. A sphygmograph stood upon the table and a gasometer-­like engine, which was new to Doctor Ripley, in the corner’ (300). The modern technologies used by Verrinder Smith here, such as the sphygmograph (a device used to measure blood pressure), signal her up-­to-­ date modern practice as well as her professionalism. Not only Ripley but also Verrinder Smith’s new patients value the new doctor’s instruments, being ‘so impressed by the firmness of her manner and by the singular, new-­fashioned instruments with which she tapped, and peered, and sounded’ (304), that it forms the subject of village conversation in Hoyland. When Ripley breaks his leg in a road accident and Verrinder Smith very skilfully patches him up, he notices the shiny instruments she carries in her bag: ‘an open case of polished instruments gleaming in the yellow light’ (308). The Idler illustration accompanying this moment shows Verrinder Smith kneeling down to tend to the injured Ripley, who appears to be in much pain – we do not, however, see the case of ‘polished instruments’ noted by the male doctor (Figure 5.2). In a period of much advancement in medical science and technology, and as a female doctor, going against what many contemporaries thought was appropriate for her sex, Verrinder Smith employs these modern medical technologies of the time to prove her worth as a doctor. Soon Ripley’s own number of patients decreases, instead flocking to his rival’s consulting room, and Verrinder Smith succeeds Ripley’s medical authority by taking on cases that he has previously pronounced impracticable.

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Figure 5.2  ‘“It’s all right, Doctor,” said she, soothingly’, in Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’, The Idler: An Illustrated Magazine, 5 (July 1894).

Despite the seemingly positive portrayal of the female doctor in Conan Doyle’s story, some critics have read ‘Doctors of Hoyland’ as a ‘traditionalist’ (Swenson 2005: 123) text. While Swenson sees the story as a satire of the medical-­woman literary genre and of the character of the female doctor therein, bearing little relation to social reality and by its comedic elements rendering ‘the “real” politics of the movement completely beside the point’ (116–17), Lilian R. Furst similarly questions the progressive politics of this ‘jovial’ or ‘wrily comic’ story (2000: 268, 271). Furst wonders if the reactions of Ripley are ‘too extreme’, or if Verrinder Smith is ‘too perfect, too much an idealized, exaggerated figure’, thus undermining the story’s interest ‘as a reflection of social reality’ (272). However, there seems to be little evidence in the story to support its characterisation as a satire on the female doctor. The character of Verrinder Smith is neither hyperfeminised nor masculinised, ‘unsexed’, as is often the case in the accounts of the popular press; instead, she carries out her work as a doctor while also displaying ‘her sweet, womanly nature’ (312), her waiting room holding not only modern medical technologies but equally ‘two or three parasols and a lady’s sun bonnet’ (299). As the narrator states, Verrinder Smith ‘was a charming companion, as well as the most assiduous doctor’ (312). Furthermore, Ripley comes to acknowledge the worth and cause of female doctors because of Verrinder Smith’s

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professionalism. In spite of his vexation, he cannot help admiring the skill of his rival: She handled the little wax-­like foot so gently, and held the tiny tenotomy knife as an artist holds his pencil. One straight insertion, one snick of a tendon, and it was all over without a stain upon the white towel which lay beneath. He had never seen anything more masterly, and he had the honesty to say so, though her skill increased his dislike of her. (306)

Ripley is thus soon persuaded by his new rival’s ‘masterly’ skills. In this way, Conan Doyle’s story satirises not the New Woman doctor but – by demonstrating the folly of Ripley’s previous convictions – those who criticise her. By narrating the story through Ripley’s viewpoint, Conan Doyle furthermore, as Furst points out, makes the readers ‘share his conversion’ (271) to the cause, forcing the reader to acknowledge the female doctor’s suitability for the profession through detailed descriptions of her scientific knowledge and ‘masterly’ technical skill. Persuaded by Verrinder Smith’s bag of ‘polished instruments’ and her skilful treatment, Ripley finally comes to terms with the sex of his rival. He apologises for his behaviour, acknowledging to ‘have been quite in the wrong . . . [o]ver this woman question’ (312). When she asks him whether he no longer thinks of female doctors as ‘necessarily unsexed’, he begs her not to recall his ‘idiotic expression’ (312). Indeed, Ripley even asks his rival to marry him, but is declined. Unlike Mona in Todd’s novel, who continues practising medicine after her marriage, Verrinder Smith intends to devote her life to science; she leaves for a position in Paris, and there is yet again only one doctor of Hoyland. As the story closes, Ripley has gone from a strong adversary of women doctors to a proponent of them, even defending the cause to a fellow male doctor. Through Verrinder Smith’s professionalism, her engagement with modern medical science and technologies, the female or New Woman doctor gains authority, and the short story is able to rework established notions of gender. While not all literary texts featuring a woman doctor might be characterised as New Woman writing, for many readers the figure of the woman doctor became a main symbol of women’s struggles not just to enter higher education but to question such a gendering of space in the first place. For authors and campaigners, literary works became one of the means through which to counter stereotypes and claims by medical men of women doctors’ ‘unwomanliness’ or of their imagined lack of professionalism in terms of skills and knowledge. While Arabella Kenealy’s Dr Janet of Harley Street makes a case for the necessity of an unsexed ‘neuter’ woman doctor, Todd and Conan Doyle in their texts

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attempt to redeem this ‘uninteresting hybrid’ by focusing on her professional as well as ‘womanly’ qualities. While the woman doctor figures as the embodiment of the ‘unsexed’ character of the New Woman, these texts carve out a space for the early woman doctor. This radicalism is still limited, however, as the New Woman doctor in these works must still adhere to late nineteenth-­century notions of femininity in order to be accepted.

Notes 1. For a fuller account of these debates, see Katharina Rowold’s The Educated Woman: Minds, Bodies, and Women’s Higher Education in Britain, Germany, and Spain, 1865–1914 (2010). For an account specifically of early women doctors, see Catriona Blake’s The Charge of the Parasols: Women’s Entry to the Medical Profession (1990). 2. Schreiner herself had wanted to become a doctor, writing in an 1884 letter to Havelock Ellis: ‘The dream of my life always was to be a doctor; I can’t remember a time when I was so small that it was not there in my heart. I used to dissect ostriches, & sheeps’ hearts & livers, & almost the first book I ever bought myself was an elementary physiology’ (Schreiner 1884). Not having enough money for medical school, Schreiner started training as a nurse. In an 1881 letter to her sister Katie, Schreiner writes that she intends to go to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh when she arrives in Britain: ‘I am not going to become a Doctor: that costs money of which I have none, but one can become a nurse without paying anything, & after all if they cannot be of so much use as the doctors they can still relieve a great deal of suffering’ (Schreiner 1881). While Schreiner nursed for a while in both Edinburgh and London, ill health soon prevented her from completing her training, and she instead turned to literature. 3. For instance, Todd is not included in The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh University Press 2006).

Chapter 6

Technologies of Detection

Along with new technologies of modernity, the late nineteenth century saw an upswing of detective fiction, following the success of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes character. Many New Woman characters in the works studied in previous chapters – such as Bella in The Girl Behind the Keys, Lois in Miss Cayley’s Adventures and Hilda in Hilda Wade – all solve mysteries at some point, coming to work as detectives while in other professions. This is not a coincidence, but rather a sign of the popularity not just of the New Woman figure but also of detective fiction in the late nineteenth century. While women could not enter the British police force until well into the twentieth century, female detectives had been a part of British crime and detective fiction since the 1860s, culminating in the 1890s with the rise of New Woman detective fiction. The modern female detective becomes the ultimate embodiment of the New Woman’s engagement with technology, as many New Woman detectives employ not just the technologies most commonly associated with the figure – the typewriter, the bicycle or medical technologies – but also other technologies of late nineteenth-­century modernity, in order to hunt down criminals and provide evidence of their guilt. This chapter concludes the book’s examination of gender and technology at the fin de siècle by focusing on the figure of the New Woman detective and the specific technologies of detection she employs. Through a consideration of the changing nature of forensic evidence in the late nineteenth century, for example by the introduction of composite photography and fingerprinting, the chapter explores the gendered use of technologies in producing new forensic knowledge. Reading Mathias McDonnell Bodkin’s Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective (1900), alongside other literary figurations, the chapter considers the figure of the female detective as a culmination of the New Woman’s use of technologies at the fin de siècle. The heroine of McDonnell Bodkin’s novel is not only a Girton graduate, but a bicycling female doctor who

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has previously worked as a telegraph girl, a telephone girl and a lady journalist. She finally settles as a lady detective, solving crimes with the help of modern technologies and using them to produce evidence in her investigations, proving her place in knowledge production. Combining the appeal of the New Woman figure and the popularity of the detective fiction genre, the New Woman detective reworks established notions of gender particularly through the use of modern technologies in scientific methods of detection.

The Rise of the New Woman Detective While detective fiction in English is a relatively young genre, the figure of the female detective is an even more recent occurrence. The origin of modern detective fiction is often traced to Edgar Allan Poe’s detective figure ‘C. Auguste Dupin’ in stories such as ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) and ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ (1842), or to the detection plot in ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844). Other often c­ ited early pioneering works in the genre are Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) with its London police man ‘Inspector Bucket’, or Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) with its intricate diamond theft plot. However, it was not until the advent in 1887 of perhaps the most famous detective of all, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, whose appearance was coupled with the proliferation of the periodical press in Britain, that detective fiction became one of the most popular genres of the day. As Kathleen Gregory Klein notes, the appearance of this famous sleuth ‘revolutionized the detective story’ by moving the genre away from that of sensation fiction into presenting ‘cooler, more intellectual puzzles’ (1995: 53), seen in the Holmesian ratiocinative or methodically reasoning method of detection. The arrival of the literary female detective is often placed within 1860s sensation fiction such as that of Mary Elizabeth Braddon or Collins, whose female characters move ‘beyond victimhood into roles as criminals and sleuths that subverted gender expectations’ (Gavin 2010: 259). The first professional female detectives appear in Andrew Forrester Jr’s The Female Detective (1864) and William Stephens Hayward’s The Revelations of a Lady Detective (c. 1864), both of which feature female sleuths working for the British police – more than fifty years before women were officially allowed on the force. Following the success of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, it was not long until detective work became a potential occupation for literary New Woman characters, and the popularity of fictional ‘lady detectives’ quickly grew. Joseph Kestner points to the crucial fact that Holmes’s

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adversary in the first short story published in the Strand Magazine, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ (1891), is a woman, and that she outsmarts him: ‘The fact that Holmes is no “superhuman” but is rather defeated by Irene Adler gave the opening to create the female detectives who became his “sisters” in the detectival tradition’ (2003: 3). Indeed, Holmes in this story admits his admiration for Irene Adler, always referring to her as ‘the woman’ (Conan Doyle 1891a: 75). As Watson records at the end of the story, while Holmes ‘used to make merry over the cleverness of women . . . I have not heard him do it of late’ (75). The upswing of female detectives in fiction at the end of the nineteenth century can be read in relation to new social and gender configurations of the time, specifically to the concept of the New Woman. While women had begun to be employed as guards to female prisoners in the 1880s, they were not given full police status by the Metropolitan police until 1918, and by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) first in the early 1920s (Kestner 2003: 5).1 Despite this fact, detection seemed an ideal career for the New Woman figure’s quest for freedom and emancipation. As Kestner notes, the female detective ‘exemplifies some of the tendencies manifest in the figure of the New Woman: sexual freedom, financial independence, a desirable career, and independent living arrangements’ (2001: 38). Many of the new periodicals of the late nineteenth century published not only detective stories (most notably, the Strand Magazine with Sherlock Holmes) but specifically female detective stories. In addition to the literary New Woman typists, bicyclists and nurses who engage in detective work on the side, here we also find women who embark upon detective work as a profession. The New Woman figure with her associated visual emblems was often employed by popular writers to attract readers, hoping to capitalise on the character’s sensation value. In the New Woman detective, such popular writers (and their publishers) found a doubly appealing figure through which, as Klein notes, they could ‘capitalize on two phenomena of the end of the nineteenth century – the rise of the detective novel and the emergence of the “new woman”’ (1995: 56–7). The New Woman detective thus became a literary trope, recurring in works by a wide variety of authors. The arrival of female detective fiction, as Klein asserts, depended upon ‘social conditions and changes which allowed readers to conceive of women in this role’ (1995: 54). In more general terms, modern detective fiction has been characterised by Walter Benjamin as being dependent on the structures of nineteenth-­century modernity, which make possible ‘the obliteration of the individual’s traces in the big city crowd’ (1973: 43), as a result of which both detectives and criminals employ new means of identity and disguise. As this new kind of society made mobile

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transformations of identity possible, police work came to occupy itself with new techniques for identifying criminals. New Woman detectives frequently use disguise in their line of work, often taking up specifically gendered positions – as housemaids or companions, for example – in order to solve crime. It can be suggested that female characters in detective stories allow for ‘quite specific kinds of detective work and detective narrative’ which were built upon established notions of femininity; including women’s adeptness at disguise, an acute eye for details which to others appear as trivia, a ‘driving curiosity’ which turns the stereotype of women’s ‘nosiness’ to good use and an ‘outsider’ status which might provide useful knowledge (Marcus 1997: ix). Despite the differences between the heroines in terms of character, workplace – whether they work independently, with the police or for a detective agency – or preferred methods of detection, similar patterns recur throughout many of the stories. Catherine Louisa Pirkis’s The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (1894) first appeared as individual stories in the Ludgate Monthly in 1893, and then as a collection the following year. Like many New Woman heroines, Loveday Brooke enters her profession out of economic necessity, as she is left penniless ‘by a jerk of Fortune’s wheel’ (1894: 7). With no marketable accomplishments (such as typewriting or teaching, one might suppose) she forthwith ‘defied conventions, and had chosen for herself a career that had cut her off sharply from her former associates and her position in society’ (7). Being a female detective is not considered a suitable profession for a lady, and although not expanded upon here as in later narratives such as Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective, Loveday Brooke depicts a clear prejudice against female detectives. However, Ebenezer Dyer, Loveday’s chief at the detective agency, would ‘wax eloquent’ over Loveday’s qualifications for her profession: ‘I don’t care twopence-­halfpenny whether she is or is not a lady. I only know she is the most sensible and practical woman I ever mer. . . . [S]he has a clear, shrewd brain, unhampered by any hard-­and-­fast theories; . . . she has so much common sense that it amounts to genius – positively to genius.’ (7–8)

Like much other detective fiction of the time, the stories engage with questions of identity and disguise, with Loveday herself repeatedly employing disguises. While many New Woman detectives after her are described as particularly attractive, or having other peculiar features, Loveday can ‘be best described in a series of negations’ (6), a non-­ specificity which lends itself to disguise. She is introduced to the reader in the story ‘The Black Bag Left on a Door-­Step’: ‘She was not tall, she was not short; she was not dark, she was not fair; she was neither

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handsome nor ugly’ (6). Indeed, Loveday’s employer comments on women’s specific suitability for the detective profession, declaring that ‘“women detectives are more satisfactory than men, for they are less likely to attract attention”’ (96). Because of their gender, women detectives can take up positions as maids, governesses and other professions associated with women’s work. Pirkis’s heroine makes use of technologies associated specifically with the Holmesian detective, employing a magnifying glass as well as invisible ink and ciphered messages. In the story ‘Missing’ a photograph proves part of the solution of the case, while other stories include discussions on the use of electric lighting to prevent crime. Like Holmes, Pirkis’s heroine is dependent upon the telegraph and the railway for communicating with her detective agency and clients, and for travelling between crime scenes. The heroine sleuth of George R. Sims’s Dorcas Dene, Detective: Her Adventures (1897) goes into the detective profession not of her own will, but, similarly to Loveday Brooke, out of economic necessity. As in Loveday Brooke, the profession seems dangerously unladylike, and Dorcas only accepts on one condition: ‘“I was to see how I got on before [her husband] Paul was told anything about it. If I found that being a lady detective was repugnant to me – if I found that it involved any sacrifice of my womanly instincts – I should resign”’ (1897: 6). She thus becomes ‘“the famous lady detective”’ who, although working independently, ‘“has a great reputation”’ with both the law court and the police (2). While Dyer values Loveday Brooke’s excellent disguising skills, Dorcas’s employer similarly appreciates her past career as an actress, which demonstrates a propensity for disguise. Like other female detectives, Dorcas’s beautiful appearance is described alongside her detective skills: she has a ‘pretty womanly face’ (7) while she is also a ‘“keen observer”’ with ‘“plenty of shrewd common sense”’ (6). Dorcas admits to still occasionally having, despite her profession, a ‘“feminine weakness”’ consisting of a ‘“fluttering heart”’ in moments of excitement (19). While Klein sees such admittance to ‘womanliness’ as contradicting Dorcas’s role as a famous lady detective, this duality could be seen as a characteristic of the popular fiction genre at the time, and not necessarily one which undercuts the subversive nature of the female detective’s forays into the previously male sphere of law enforcement. Indeed, Dorcas Dene, Detective proved so popular as to be followed by a second series in 1898. The heroine of Fergus Hume’s Hagar of the Pawn-­Shop (1898) is not the typical ‘lady’ detective, like Loveday Brooke or Dorcas Dene, but a young Roma woman who has taken refuge working in a pawn-­shop after fleeing an unwanted suitor. Hagar spends her days dealing with

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fallen aristocrats, thieves and the poor, all of whom she is ready to threaten with her revolver or box their ears if needed. Like many female detectives of the time she combines good looks with a scientific mind: she is an ‘Eastern beauty . . . in all her rich loveliness’ who in her post becomes ‘as clever as [her employer] Jacob himself’ (9, 13). Hagar is admired for her ‘dark loveliness’ coupled with both her ‘untamed spirit’ and a ‘clear mind and unerring judgment’ (14). However, unlike more well-­established lady detectives, Hagar does not advertise her services but is consulted by customers in the shop and, occasionally, by members of the police force. While both Loveday Brooke and Dorcas Dene use their supposedly feminine adeptness for disguise in their detective work, some of Hagar’s methods similarly seem to be ascribed to her gender. In the story ‘The Second Customer and the Amber Beads’, in which Hagar solves a murder case linked to a pawned necklace, she agrees to take on the case with ‘true feminine curiosity’, and at the crime scene she – ‘after the manner of women’ – takes ‘immediate note’ (55–6) of the looks and manner of one of the suspects. However, as explained in a later story, she adds to ‘her feminine instinct . . . a logical judgment masculine in its discretion’ (195). While instinct in Hagar of the Pawn-­Shop is seen as a feminine characteristic, and logic is configured as a masculine one, Hagar possesses both these qualities. Indeed, after Hagar’s successful solution of the Amber Bead case, her co-­investigator at Scotland Yard ‘compliments’ his colleague, saying that ‘“You ought to be a man, with that head of yours . . . you’re too good to be a woman”’ (61), determining that the scientific mind needed for detective work is a specifically male one. Hagar herself compares her detection skills to the scientific methods of natural historian and zoologist George Cuvier: To find that strange stories were attached to many pawned articles; to ascertain such histories of the past; to follow up their conclusions in the future – these things greatly pleased the girl, and gave her an interest in a somewhat dull life. . . . Out of a giant tooth, an unburied bone, a mighty footprint, Cuvier could construct a marvellous and prehistoric world. In like manner, from some trifle upon which she lent money, Hagar would deduce tales as fantastic as the Arabian Nights, as adventurous as the story of Gil Blas. (109)

In addition to the reference to Cuvier here, the use of the word ‘deduce’ to describe Hagar’s methods seems a reference to the Holmesian method of observation and deduction. The narrator makes sure not to describe Hagar’s supposedly feminine curiosity as unrestrained ‘nosiness’, but characterises curiosity rather as the ‘parent of all great discoveries’ (112), perhaps in this way questioning the strict gendering of the detection of crime.

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Florence Cusack in L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace’s The Detections of Miss Cusack (1899–1900), serialised in five stories in the Harmsworth Magazine, is another detective who combines ‘womanly’ beauty with a ‘male’ intellect. Florence is a ‘young and handsome woman’ who possesses ‘suberabundant health’ and ‘extraordinary’ energies (1998: 3). Indeed, her handsome appearance makes it ‘almost impossible to believe’ that she is a ‘power in the police courts, and highly respected by every detective in Scotland Yard’ (3–4). Like many of her sister sleuths, Miss Cusack employs various disguises in her trade; for instance, in the story ‘Mr Bovey’s Unexpected Will’ she dresses ‘as a domestic servant on her evening out’, wearing ‘a thick veil and a plainly trimmed hat’ (15–16). In her career she comes across a variety of crimes including gambling, forgery, blackmail, horse-­racing, thefts in railway carriages, and the use of invisible ink. Florence confidently refers to herself as ‘“the most acute and, I believe, successful lady detective in the whole of London”’ (4), a statement which implies that there are many female detectives just in London alone. While Florence describes her methods of detection as ‘a chain of reasoning’, the Watson-­like narrator Dr Lonsdale – in line with the logic of gendering knowledge depicted in Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade discussed in Chapter 4 – instead refers to the female detective’s theories as based rather on ‘intuitions’ (74, 67). Gillian Sutherland’s suggestion that the New Woman figure is ‘not a crystallisation of change already accomplished, rather it is a sign that change was beginning’ (2015: 165) seems particularly true in the case of the female detective. In the case of Baroness Orczy’s Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910) the heroine even works at Scotland Yard and collaborates with various branches of law enforcement. Despite the fact that the genre thus allows fictional women to take up positions in spaces not open to them in practice for decades, female detective fiction has been considered by many critics as caught in an inherently conservative genre. Nineteenth-­ century detective fiction is frequently seen as ‘conservative and conventional’, with cases solved and ‘moral order restored’ (Gavin 2010: 261). While female detectives of the period could potentially be seen as ‘rather romanticized symbols of liberation’, Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan argue that their function lay in ‘preserving the status quo’ (1981: 17). Klein similarly argues that the crime fiction genre is marked by an ‘inherent conservatism [which] upholds power and privilege’, causing an ‘unacknowledged sabotage’ of the female detective heroines (1995: 1). This ‘sabotage’ of the woman detective, according to Klein, is encoded in structure as well as in characterisation, with the basic structural designs of the works repeatedly undercutting their seemingly liberal attitude towards women in public

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roles (57). Indeed, there is a tendency among literary female detectives to choose either detection or marriage, many authors ‘abandoning’ the heroine in mid-­career and ‘finishing her off, not at the Reichenbach Falls, but at the matrimonial altar’ (Slung 1976: xv–xvi, xx) in order to fit into the supposed conservatism of the genre. However, more recent work on the female detective has highlighted the potential subversive character of the genre, rather than its failure to step away from a Victorian marriage plot. Female detectives of the period can indeed be argued to ‘operate subversively’: ‘when they solve a case moral certainties may be re-­established but gender role expectations are broken down’ (Gavin 2010: 261). Perhaps the main way in which female detectives operate to destabilise gender norms is through their part in producing forensic evidence, in other words producing knowledge. Kestner argues that the one quality characterising early female detectives is the ‘surveillance’ they exercise over both public institutions and private domestic spaces: ‘Even though this surveillance existed in an empowering symbolic practise [sic] and not in actuality, the idea of a woman exercising power through her gaze is enormously potent for the time. Narratives involving the female detective thus convey an ideology of female professional appropriation of power’ (2003: 226). As Ronald R. Thomas notes, through its forensic use of medical and other investigative scientific technologies, detective fiction works through the ‘combined professional discourses of law and medicine’ (1999: 74) – two professions traditionally categorised as male. Bringing together the New Woman’s use of and identification with a range of technologies, while placing her in a profession associated with the male sphere of law enforcement, New Woman detective fiction signals women’s place alongside men in institutions of knowledge production.

Producing Evidence, Producing Knowledge Detective fiction of the late nineteenth century is to a large extent dependent upon modern technologies of the time, such technologies often forming part of both narrative and characterisation. Indeed, as Thomas argues in Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, the history of detective fiction is ‘deeply implicated with the history of forensic technology’ (1999: 3). While detective fiction is often regarded as a ‘cerebral form’ appealing to the reasoning faculties of readers and repeating the ratiocinative formula of the Sherlock Holmes stories, the genre is in fact ‘fundamentally preoccupied with physical evidence’: the literary detective claims authority for him-­or herself ‘through the

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“devices” by which he [or she] discovers the truth’ (Thomas 1999: 9, 3). Similarly, while much late nineteenth-­century detective fiction engages with contemporary scientific methods and theories of law enforcement, the genre often foreshadows technologies and techniques later used by criminologists and the police. Considering the literary female detective in relation to new scientific methods and technologies of detection allows an examination of ways in which forensic evidence is produced in literature and culture of the time. The nineteenth century involved new ways of producing evidence and of deciding what could now count as ‘proof’ of guilt or of innocence in a court of law. As explored in Chapter 4, knowledge and truth are produced and reinforced in complex ways and are always located within the prevailing power relations. Foucault describes the split between older forms of justice and modern ones, explaining that contemporary readers would be ‘far removed’ from older practices in which criminals were convicted by their own confession, and where accounts of their executions were widely circulated: ‘we have moved from the exposition of the facts or the confession to the slow process of discovery; from the execution to the investigation; from the physical confrontation to the intellectual struggle between criminal and investigator’ (1991: 69). Foucault outlines not merely a change in the criminal system but a change in how forensic knowledge is produced, suggesting a transformation of the ways in which ‘truths’ about crime and criminality come into being through legal and medical institutions in their quest for scientific legitimation.2 Building upon Foucault’s engagement with new discourses of truth-­finding, Tom Gunning locates the ‘modern concept of evidence’ in criminology and detective fiction of the time: The nineteenth century witnessed a rearrangement of the hierarchy of judicial proof, as the value previously accorded to witness testimony was replaced by the scientific reputation of the analyses of indices. . . . This new concept of evidence transformed both the narrative logic of signs of guilt and the methods of recognition. Instead of reading conventional signs imprinted on the criminal body with the force of sovereign power, detection was approached as a science, employing careful measurement and observation, privileging regimes of knowledge over brute force. (1995: 22)

Detection now became approached as science, established through the use of modern forensic technologies. The focus of law enforcement thus shifted, as noted by Foucault, ‘from the execution to the investigation’, to a production of medico-­ legal truths about crime and criminality which involved new technologies as part of the method of detection. While photography in the mid-nineteenth century proved one of the most used technologies to map and detect crime and supposedly

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criminal ‘types’, a myriad of other methods of measuring and marking the individual appeared at the end of the century. The last decade, in particular, saw considerable developments in investigative techniques in Britain and beyond. In the 1905 article ‘Scientific Methods of Detecting Criminals’, Dr Louis Elkind states that the detection of crime ‘can at last be said to have entered into a thoroughly scientific stage’: ‘Up to a few years ago the detective had to rely for the most part on a certain amount of philosophy, considerable knowledge of human nature, and deductions from inferences . . . his methods were not nearly as reliable as could be wished’ (1905: 362). Noting the first step in this scientific direction as the moment when ‘criminal investigation departments began to make extensive use of photography’ by photographing criminals, Elkind numbers other such moments: the ‘epoch-­making event in the scientific detection of crime’ is Alphonse Bertillon’s ‘now world-­famous’ anthropomorphic identification system (363), which Scotland Yard established in 1894. The Bertillon system was a scientific identification system based on physical measurements, often supplanted with standardised photographs and detailed files, used by police to identify criminals – this system is the precursor to our contemporary ‘mug shot’ (Thomas 1999: 121–2). Bertillon’s system was soon to be supplanted, however, with the more precise method of fingerprinting: in 1895 Francis Galton published Fingerprint Directories, the first publication detailing the use of fingerprinting, and two years later the first conviction on the basis of fingerprinting occurred, in India (Kestner 2003: 27). Elkind notes in his article that while in 1905 the Bertillon system has not yet been abandoned in favour of fingerprinting, and to his mind it will always remain in use to an extent, fingerprinting is ‘the system of the future’ (1905: 365). The decade furthermore included early experiments with lie detectors: criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso in 1895 adapted the sphygmograph to measure changes in the suspect’s blood pressure when interrogated (Thomas 1999: 21). In 1894 the first conviction by the identification of typewriters took place (Kestner 2003: 27), a detective method described a few years earlier in the 1891 Sherlock Holmes story ‘A Case of Identity’ in which a criminal is traced through the characteristics of his typewritten letters. The ‘scientification’ of crime detection is discussed in popular periodicals of the time. In March 1880 two articles on ‘Science and Crime’ were published in All the Year Round, stating that modern detective work is useless without scientific expertise and technology: ‘only, when aided by the skilled expert – the chemist, surgeon, physiologist, or engraver – and by the deductions and inductions science is able or prepared to draw from any given set of circumstances, is justice enabled to enter upon the

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pursuit of crime’ (1880: 347). The first article briefly mentions Galton’s criminal anthropology and his use of composite photography to discern ‘certain natural classes of criminals’ – a racist theory which, although persisting for decades and forming part of eugenicist discourse, is thankfully now discarded – as a potential way of determining causes of crime. However, the main focus of the article is the ‘ways and means science brings to bear on the detection of crime’: Our newspapers familiarise us, day by day, with instances of the application of scientific methods to criminal investigation. . . . Every case of homicide brings its array of medical and surgical evidence, or its quota of chemists, prepared to do battle for the truth. . . . A blood-­stain, and its nature, when interpreted by the microscopist, may convict the suspected, or may, on the other hand, set him free. (348)

Closer to the end of the century, T. F. Manning in ‘The Medical Detective and His Work: Criminals Convicted by the Microscope’ (1898) details aspects of how the scientific method has changed police work, highlighting especially the use of modern medical technologies and science to detect crime: tools such as the magnifying glass, the microscope and the spectroscope, and new chemical tests for different kinds of poisoning. Published in the Harmsworth Magazine, which had earlier published The Detections of Miss Cusack alongside other detective fiction, the article details the work done by medical forensics and chemists, explaining the practice of a post-­mortem and of various chemical tests for poison. Manning in this article argues that ‘a single medical expert is worth half Scotland Yard in the detection and prevention of crime’: Although great poisoning, shooting, stabbing, and other homicidal trials have a wonderful fascination for all newspaper readers, very few fully appreciate the medical evidence, which is usually the most important link in the chain. The evidence is of three kinds – that of the ordinary medical man, who sees the patient dying, perhaps, and performs the post-­mortem; that of the chemist, who, in his quiet laboratory, traces the poison or identifies the blood stain; and that of the expert, who gives his inference from the facts stated by the first two. (1898: 144)

Two illustrations accompany the article, one depicting ‘the old style detective – examining scene of murder’ and the other describing ‘the detective – new style – in the laboratory’ (144–5). The discrepancy between this ‘old’ traditional and ‘new’ scientific detective is apparent: while the former stands in an abandoned alleyway, with a coat and hat on and some rather unsophisticated tool – possibly a ruler – in his hand, examining a window, the latter (Figure 6.1) is placed in a chemical labo-

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Figure 6.1  ‘The Detective – New Style – In the Laboratory’, in T. F. Manning, ‘The Medical Detective and His Work: Criminals Convicted by the Microscope’, Harmsworth Magazine, 1 (1898). National Library of Scotland.

ratory, measuring and pouring liquids in a vial, and surrounded by jars, vials and various complicated instruments. Sherlock Holmes is the embodiment of the ‘scientific detective’ described by Elkind and his colleagues – indeed, certain methods illustrated by Conan Doyle predate their actual use in forensic science. In A Study in Scarlet (1887) Holmes’s methods are described as consisting of the often-­repeated terms ‘observation’ and ‘deduction’ (1996a: 17). These methods of detection are further explained in The Sign of Four (1890), Holmes noting that the three qualities needed for the ideal detective are the powers of observation, deduction and knowledge (1996b: 65). Holmes continually stresses the scientific nature of his profession, calling himself a ‘scientific detective’ and naming detection ‘an exact science’ (1996b: 65). Indeed, in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–2) Holmes is referred to by a client as ‘“the second highest expert in Europe”’ after the above m ­ entioned criminologist Bertillon in terms of superiority, the client explaining that both their work appeals to ‘“the man of precisely scientific mind”’ (1901: 126). Holmes has written several scientific articles and books, ‘all on technical subjects’

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that are relevant to his profession (1996b: 65), and spends much of his time studying chemistry or anatomy. In this way, Thomas argues, it is the literary figure of the detective rather than the lawyer who embodies the transformation of forensic knowledge, the change ‘of “testimony” into “things” to produce “real evidence”’ (1999: 35), in the nineteenth century. The Sherlock Holmes stories make frequent use of new technologies such as the railway and the telegraph, not only in aiding the detective in his travel and communication, but often placing them at the centre of the narrative and connecting them with discussions on what counts as evidence. In addition to typewriter identification, chemical analyses and various other technologies, photography plays a major part in several of the stories. From its invention and spread in the 1840s, photography more than any other technology of the time was used both as a means of identification and as a means of gathering evidence of crime (Thomas 1999: 111–30). While earlier it was speech, writing or ‘marks of criminality’ that were used to identify criminals, the invention of photography offered a new and seemingly more precise way of identifying a criminal, thus becoming ‘the ideal tool of the process of detection, the ultimate modern clue’ (Gunning 1995: 20). A stolen photograph lies at the heart of the plot, structure and culmination of the first short story featuring Sherlock Holmes, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ (1891). This story highlights the double status of the photograph as both an art form and a science; its dual function both as ‘artistic representation of middle-­class self-­possession’ and as ‘scientific tool for criminal control’ (Thomas 1999: 114). Holmes’s client, the King of Bohemia, asks the master detective to help cover up his past love affair with the retired opera singer and ‘“well-­known adventuress”’ Irene Adler. Disregarding letters and other possible evidence of the affair, Holmes admits that Irene’s possession of a photograph with both lovers in it will prove fatal: ‘“Oh, dear! That is very bad! Your Majesty has indeed committed an indiscretion”’ (1891a: 66). Holmes here makes it clear that his client’s indiscretion lies not in having had the affair but in having been photographed with his mistress: ‘As a mode of evidence that cannot be denied, photography is indeed indiscreet, capturing information that could otherwise be hushed up or explained away’ (Gunning 1995: 19). While Holmes in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ cannot at first see how Irene Adler will be able to prove the authenticity of her claims of a love affair, the existence of a photograph changes his mind. As the king states, the potential use of the photograph as evidence will have ‘“an influence upon European history”’ (1891a: 65). As in criminology of the time, the photograph is used in detective fiction ‘as a guarantor of identity’

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(Gunning 1995: 19) through which to establish a person’s guilt or innocence. While the late Victorian era saw a change in the formulation of what is considered evidence, a change expressed through modern forensic science and its technological devices, literary female detectives played a crucial role in this transformation of knowledge production. What constitutes the best kind of evidence in late Victorian detective fiction, and how is this knowledge produced? And, perhaps more importantly for this book, what role does gender play in these reconfigurations of law enforcement, criminality and public space?

‘One of the Most Remarkable Specimens of New Womanhood’: Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective (1900) In its review of Mathias McDonnell Bodkin’s (1850–1933) Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective (1900; Figure 6.2), The Spectator names the heroine of the book ‘one of the most remarkable specimens of new womanhood ever evolved in modern and ancient fiction’ (‘Novels of the Week’ 1900: 21). Indeed, the novel constructs its lady detective through an almost

Figure 6.2  Front cover, Mathias McDonnell Bodkin, Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective (London: Chatto & Windus, 1900). National Library of Scotland.

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hyperbolic use of New Woman machinery: not only is Dora Myrl a bicycling Girton graduate, but she has occupied a range of New Woman professions before settling as a detective. If the female detective signifies the culmination of the New Woman’s use of technologies at the fin de siècle, Dora is the New Woman detective par excellence: solving crimes with the help of modern technologies and using them to produce evidence in her investigations, she proves her place in the supposedly male spheres of medico-­legal knowledge production. Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective consists of twelve stories which were first serialised in Pearson’s Weekly in 1899 and then published in book form in 1900. The book contains all stories from the magazine publication, although not in the same order as they originally appeared. The multifaceted McDonnell Bodkin wrote in a variety of genres, including history, novels, plays and political campaigning texts. An Irish nationalist MP, senior barrister, judge, editor and writer (Wilson Foster 2008: 58 n. 30), he was famous for his stories about the male detective Paul Beck, which appeared first serialised and later in book form in Paul Beck, The Rule-­ of-­ Thumb Detective (1898). McDonnell Bodkin is advertised on the title page of Dora Myrl as the ‘author of “Paul Beck, the Rule-­of-­Thumb Detective”’, and reviews of this female detective narrative often compare Dora to her male counterpart. The Saturday Review declares that McDonnell Bodkin’s heroine ‘will surpass Paul Beck’ in the estimation of detective fiction lovers: while Dora in ‘ingenuity and resource’ is far behind Sherlock Holmes, the reviewer considers all but one of the stories ‘original and well told’ (‘Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective’ 1900: 21). A half-­hearted review of the novel in The Academy notes the stories’ tendency ‘to display Miss Myrl’s superlative gifts of deduction and opportunism’, and considers some of the mysteries which she unravels to be ‘fairly obvious’ (‘Dora Myrl’ 1900: 166). Meanwhile, The Spectator asserts that despite the book being ‘full of absurdities and solecisms . . . its simplicity and vivacity are irresistible’ (‘Novels of the Week’ 1900: 21). Despite the overall positive reviews, the novel has not been noted by many New Woman scholars, perhaps due to the scarcity of copies and the fact that it has only been reprinted as a whole in a costly Canadian collection. Dora Myrl is introduced in the story ‘The False Heir and the True’ as she comes pedalling on her bicycle, that New Woman emblem above others: ‘a dainty little lady leaping from the machine’ (1900: 1). Her appearance causes her new employer Roderick Aylmer to murmur in amazement: ‘“That schoolgirl a Cambridge wrangler and a Doctor of Medicine! It’s too absurd”’ (1). Despite the narrator’s assertion that there ‘was certainly nothing of the New Woman’ about Dora (1), she

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certainly belongs to that character: on a bicycle, with a short skirt and cycling shoes, a medical doctor with a Cambridge degree. Like the New Woman heroine of Grant Allen’s Miss Cayley’s Adventures (1899), the orphan Dora is a Cambridge ‘Wrangler’, a student who gains first-­class honours in the undergraduate degree in Mathematics. In addition to her bicycling habit, the athletic Dora plays tennis, croquet and golf. Once graduated from Cambridge, Dora spent the money inherited from her father in studying to become a medical doctor: ‘“But practice didn’t come, and I couldn’t and wouldn’t wait for it. Within the last year I have been a telegraph girl, a telephone girl, a lady journalist. I liked the last best”’ (6). McDonnell Bodkin here clearly characterises his heroine as ‘the archetypal New Woman’ (Klein 1995: 58); she seems ‘almost an Identikit New Woman’ (Willis 1999: 65). As if the appearance of Dora on her bicycle in the first sentence of the novel were not enough, Dora’s position as a New Woman is signalled already on the front cover of the novel, which pictures the silhouette of a woman bicycling on uneven ground, at night, with moon and stars shining (Figure 6.2). At the outset of the book, Dora is engaged as a companion in the Aylmer residence. She enters the detective profession by solving the mystery of her employer’s melancholy, through closely observing the details of the case and the material evidence presented, and deducing the rest. Echoing the late nineteenth-­ century characterisation of the  detective as a scientist, Dora’s detective work is compared to a medical science: ‘like a skilled physician searching a patient’s body with a stethescope [sic] when he finds the lurking disease at last’ (7). Her detection skills a success, Dora decides upon the detective profession. While the opening story presents a case of Holmesian observation and deduction of individuals’ behaviours and markers of identity, many of the following stories explicitly thematise late nineteenth-­century technologies both as means and as detection of crime. While the scientific method is an integral part of modern detective work, criminals themselves also use new sciences and technologies. In his 1900 article ‘The Bicycle and Crime’, Lombroso laments the use of new technological inventions by criminals: Every new mechanism adopted in our daily life multiplies the causes and the number of crimes. Electricity and magnetism in the hands of delirious degenerates have lent themselves to murder; and as they enter into new instruments they develop fresh forms of crime – as, for instance, the use in highway robbery of the assommoir électrique [electric shock], which knocks down a passenger with a single blow, the employment of chloroform to deprive the thief’s victim of consciousness or of dynamite to force the strong-­room. No sooner were railways laid than sprang up a whole crop of railway offences, not the least of which was the derailing of trains. (1900: 310)

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The adventures of Dora Myrl involve criminal cases of all of these variations: the use of electricity and magnetism in ‘The Last Shall Be First’; chloroform, as part of one of the ‘railway offences’ feared by Lombroso, in ‘How He Cut His Stick’; and a planned derailing of trains – supposedly by dynamite – in ‘A Railway Race’. In these stories and further ones, however, Dora manages to outsmart the criminals by her own use of the Holmesian scientific method of detection and by her familiarity with modern science and technology. In addition to the innovations outlined by Lombroso as providing ‘fresh forms of crime’, in the story ‘How He Cut His Stick’ the telegraph is used to carry out crime. The crime in question takes place on a fast-­ moving train, with the aid of chloroform and telegraph wires. In this story, the junior bank clerk Jim Pollock is suspected of having stolen money he was transporting from the bank’s head office to a branch down the railway line. While Pollock claims to have been chloroformed and robbed in his supposedly empty carriage – as the train was in movement between stations – this explanation does not convince the police. Having searched the carriage and found no criminal hiding, the police conclude that Pollock must have thrown the bag containing the money out of the window to an accomplice. The narrator informs us, incidentally, that telegraph communication had stopped very near the site of the crime. The severance of communications is located ‘about nine miles outside Eddiscombe’ where ‘[s]ome of the wires had been pulled down half way to the ground, and the insulators smashed to pieces on one of the poles’ and the ground is ‘trampled with heavy footprints’ (44). Dora is called in by the senior partner of the banking firm to assist on the case. Questioning the validity of the police’s evidence, Dora declares that young Pollock is innocent, and has him released from custody to help her with the case. They both travel to the town of Eddiscombe, where Dora instructs her assistant to look not for a man with a black calfskin bag, as the police would have it, but for someone ‘“with a crooked stick”’ (48). Suspecting a man called McCrowder who is staying at their hotel, Dora contrives to get a good look at his walking stick, which indeed has ‘on the inside of the crook a deep notch, cutting through the varnish into the wood’ (49). When McCrowder is seen heading out on his bicycle, Dora and Pollock follow him on a pair of bicycles. When they near the location where the telegraph wire has been broken, the new suspect puts on a spurt. The mobility offered by the bicycle, so useful for the New Woman in her quest for freedom, also makes it (in Lombroso’s words) ‘a most serviceable instrument for the accomplishment of other crimes; for what so well facilitates flight and alibi as the bicycle – swifter than the horse, safer than the railway with its blabbing telegraph?’ (314).

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Indeed, Lombroso suggests that ‘no modern mechanism has assumed the extraordinary importance of the bicycle, either as a cause or as an instrument of crime’ (310). While the bicycle in ‘How He Cut His Stick’ is not the cause of the crime, it becomes the means by which McCrowder hopes to carry out the final part of his clandestine plan. However, if the bicycle works as a way to facilitate crime, it also offers possibilities to suppress crime. Dora follows the criminal with Pollock behind her, both answering the criminal’s spurt with increased speed. They catch up with McCrowder just as he gets hold of the bag containing the money, which he had hidden in the woods to avoid suspicion. The stories in Dora Myrl end with a recapitulation of Dora’s thoughts and methods, as she explains to her clients (or sometimes criminals) how she unravelled the mystery. While one reviewer of the book states that the heroine’s methods ‘might be described as intuitive’ (‘Novels of the Week’ 1900: 21), the structure of the stories negates this notion: the clues and investigation are in a ‘Holmesean manner’ attributed to the ‘ratiocinative process’ (Klein 1995: 59) that characterises Conan Doyle’s detective. Dora in ‘How He Cut His Stick’ explains the stages of her observation and deduction to the police. Having noted the location where the telegraph wire was broken down the line, and observed that the wires ran close to the railway carriage, she concluded what they had missed: ‘It was easy for an active man to slip a crooked stick like this’ (she held up Mr. McCrowder’s stick as she spoke) ‘over the two or three of the wires and so swing himself into the air clear of the train. The acquired motion would carry him along the wires to the post and give him a chance of breaking down the insulators. . . . The friction of the wire,’ Dora went on in the even tone of a lecturer, ‘with a man’s weight on it, would bite deep into the wood of the stick, like that!’ (58)

Dora’s astonishing ratiocinative abilities, together with her knowledge of telegraph construction and her bicycling skills, make it possible for this New Woman detective to solve a case that has baffled the police. While the telegraph here is not in itself used as a means of detection, the knowledge of this technology and its relationship with the railway is essential for the solution of the crime. Solving crimes through his famous scientific method of observation and deduction, Sherlock Holmes is considered ‘the classically ratiocinative sleuth’ (Klein 1995: 2). While Michele Slung argues that for early female detectives ‘[k]een analytical reasoning was not their forte, and they did not thrive on empiricism’ (1976: xxi), Dora Myrl contradicts this notion. Like other New Woman detectives, Dora takes up the Holmesian ratiocinative method, counteracting nineteenth-­century theories of women as irrational:

182    Gender, Technology and the New Woman Identified as a profession involving reason, which was construed in the nineteenth century to be the province of men rather than women, the female detective is gender-­bending in terms of patriarchal constructions of the feminine, since she is empowered primarily through rationality. . . . The emphasis in female detective fiction on ratiocinative processes clearly runs counter to such received constructions of the feminine as non-­logical in Victorian and Edwardian culture. (Kestner 2003: 229–31)

Because of her demonstrated capacity for reason and the part she plays in forensic knowledge production, the female detective is therefore ‘to varying degrees a threat to male empowerment and male-­ identified institutions such as the courts or the detective police’ (Kestner 2003: 229–30). Placed alongside Sherlock Holmes as a colleague, using the same scientific method of observation and deduction, the female detective becomes part of a medico-­legal scientific gaze, and by her presence threatens established notions of gender roles and gendered spheres. Possibly because of the threat she poses, Dora encounters scepticism towards her choice of profession. The villain of the story ‘The Clue’, in which Dora helps a friend regain a compromising letter, calls her ‘the brightest and cleverest woman he ever met’ (105). Despite this, and fooled by Dora’s pretended innocence, he thinks to himself that ‘“[t]here is a world of humour in the notion of unsophisticated Dora as a lady detective”’ (114). Similarly, the malefactor of the story ‘The Palmist’, Dr Phillimore, calls her profession as a lady detective a ‘“somewhat incongruous – I won’t say comical – profession for a charming young lady”’, asking her if she really thinks ‘“that women can fairly pit themselves in mind and body against cunning and strong men”’ (72–3). This opposition between Dora and Dr Phillimore becomes central to the story, focusing on their mutual reliance on evidence as a basis for knowledge. In ‘The Palmist’ Dora is called to the Phillimore household, where Mrs Phillimore has been poisoned with arsenic. A member of household staff – the nurse Honor – is suspected. Dora asks her friend Eveline Morris, who lives in the affected household, what Dr Phillimore thinks of his wife’s death. Eveline exclaims: ‘“Oh! He’s a strange man. He does not believe in anything or anyone; not even in God”’ (66). When Dora asks her friend if Dr Phillimore does not suspect the nurse Honor, Eveline explains: ‘“He does not say that. He says the evidence is very strong against her; he goes altogether on the evidence”’ (66). Dr Phillimore’s absolute reliance on evidence is explained by his lack of religious belief: a medical man, he is also an agnostic, telling Dora that he will only believe in what can be proven: ‘“I don’t believe in God and I don’t disbelieve. I simply don’t know. But I, Dr. Phillimore, don’t expect any existence after death except, of course, the chemical existence of

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the elements of my body . . . I believe in anything and everything that is proved to me”’ (69–70). It seems that Dora may have met her match in this scientific man and his reliance on physical evidence as a basis for knowledge. However, the doctor also puts faith in certain pseudosciences such as phrenology, astrology and especially palmistry, which he considers to ‘“have clearly established its claim to acceptance by unprejudiced seekers of the truth”’ (70). While in his 1905 article on scientific crime detection Dr Elkind deems it ‘scarcely necessary to say that there is nothing whatever in common between the finger-­print system and palmistry’ (1905: 365), Dr Phillimore’s belief in this pseudoscience is used to mark him in opposition to Dora, the modern scientific detective who deploys knowledge, observation and deduction to establish truth. Doubting the guilt of the household nurse, Dora checks on the analysis of the hot chocolate in which the arsenic had been placed. T. F. Manning in his article on the medical detective notes the importance of the chemist’s work in forensic science: Reliable as are the microscope and spectroscope, the analyst always uses the third means at his disposal – the chemical test. For instance, he gets a knife covered with dark red stains. Are they blood, or are they only the rust formed by vinegar or the juice of a lemon that has deceived so many people? . . . On all these little things hinges, very often, the terrible issue of ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’! (1898: 150–2)

Manning explains the procedures of testing for arsenic poisoning, detailing both the medical analyst’s ‘brew’ and the chemist’s test: The suspected liquid is put in a little glass test-­tube with some hydrochloric acid. Then a small bit of bright copper is dropped in, and the test-­tube is held over a flame. . . . The arsenic abandons the copper, and clings in crystals to the sides of the glass tube, where it can be recognised by the aid of a magnifying-­glass or microscope. (147)

The article includes two illustrations of this process: one of the medical detective at work by his microscope, and another of what arsenic would look like through the microscopic lens. While in ‘The Palmist’ Dora agrees with the chemist’s analysis of the Phillimore case, she doubts the general suspicion of the household nurse. Honor is suspected as she had been seen leaving the surgery where Dr Phillimore keeps the arsenic; however, Dora finds out that it was, in fact, Dr Phillimore who added the arsenic. Through her observations of the events and individuals involved, but without concrete proof yet, Dora deduces that Dr Phillimore is the murderer. Playing upon his belief in palmistry, Dora dresses up as a practitioner of the trade and tricks the murderer into confessing his crime

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while two policemen are hidden in the room. In disguise, Dora lures a confession out of the doctor through a pretend study of his hands, after which he asks her to divine his future: ‘Whose hand put the arsenic in your wife’s cup?’ ‘It was mine, I tell you! . . . It’s my turn to question now. Tell me, shall Mabel Graham [Eveline’s governess] ever be mine as wife or mistress – I care not which?’   She examined his hands intently; first the right and then the left. . . . There was a sudden gleam in the white light; a sharp click of steel, and the handcuffs were tight on the doctor’s wrists.   ‘This is your answer,’ cried Dora Myrl’s voice as she leaped from the chair. (79–80)

Once Dora has handcuffed the villain, the hidden policemen appear to take Dr Phillimore away. Dora plays on the supposedly scientific doctor’s misguided belief in the pseudoscience of palmistry, defeating him with her extraordinary skills not only of observation and deduction but of disguise. While palmistry is ridiculed in Dora Myrl, there were sciences and technologies that still seemed ‘magical’ at the end of the nineteenth century. While both telegraphy and typewriting have been noted as such technologies (Thurschwell 2001a), it was electricity that most perplexed the late Victorians. As Alex Goody notes, electricity, electrical science and electrical engineering ‘transformed Victorian culture’, bringing in what has been termed the ‘electric age’ (2011: 7). Electricity took on an increasingly visible role in everyday British life while also seeming a ‘magical’ or ‘mysterious’ force: the scientific account of electrical phenomena at the end of the nineteenth century still remained ‘arcane and obtuse to the non-­expert, and even experts themselves failed to achieve a universal understanding of electricity’ (Goody 2011: 8). An 1892 article entitled ‘The Modern Wonder-­ Worker, Electricity’, in Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts, praises the new uses of electricity as lighting, motor and communication. The author especially remarks upon the debt owed to ‘this modern magician’ called electricity for the power it gives, for example through communication technologies such as telegraphy (1892: 178). An 1897 article in the same periodical, entitled ‘New Applications of Electricity’, places electricity as the foremost among industrial developments in the latter half of the nineteenth century, giving it the same place of the steam ­engine in the former half of the century. While electric telegraphs were first used on land in 1847 and ocean telegraphy in 1850, electricity at the end of the century was now also used for lighting purposes, which despite being ‘so recently as 1880 in its experimental stage’ was ‘now no longer regarded as a novelty except in country districts’ (1897: 444).

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It is against this background of electricity as one of the late nineteenth-­ century technological ‘newnesses’ that we can read Dora’s knowledge of electrical engineering and the workings of the ‘modern magician’ that is electricity, in the horse-­racing crime story ‘The Last Shall Be the First’. The use of electricity as motor is especially notable in this story, as the villain makes use of an electric generator to carry out his crime. Once the relation between electricity and magnetism was theorised in the 1870s, the electrostatic generators that had previously been used could be supplanted by more effective generators that converted mechanical energy (for example by using a hand crank) to electrical energy. In McDonnell Bodkin’s narrative, the New Woman detective demonstrates not only her keen sense of observation and deduction, but her knowledge of electrical engineering and of the workings of this new technology. Dora’s client in ‘The Last Shall Be the First’ is the young Archie Grant, who asks her to help discover foul play at a horse-­racing competition. Dora is invited to stay on the estate of Sir Warner, one of the horse-­ racing competitors, to investigate the suspected villainy. While there she spends her time ‘secretly exploring’ the grounds with Archie while keeping up appearances playing golf, tennis or riding bicycles (91). At a previous race the telegraph, which had been run in from the road to the race course for the occasion, broke down just after the race, the wire having been ‘“cut about seven miles away, right opposite a shooting box of Sir Warner’s”’ (88). Knowing this, Dora specifically explores a big hedge on the grounds, a ‘big thick bullfinch’ type of fence with bushes which the horse is supposed to jump through rather than over, where at the previous race the leading horse ‘stood stock still shivering’ (85) and thus left the runner-­up horse to win the race. Just by this big hedge Dora finds on the ground, close to the roots of the blackthorn, ‘a number of grains of what looked like buckshot, but, on rubbing the black off, they proved to be red copper’; on the branches, ‘a few thin tattered fragments of oil silk or gutta-­percha tissue that is used in surgery’; and finally – hidden in the soil near the fence – a ‘small medicine bottle with a narrow neck, quite empty’ (89). Although Archie cannot make much out of these discoveries, Dora claims to ‘“begin to see light”’ (89). For the upcoming race, too, the telegraph is brought in from the road, Sir Warner employing his own electrical engineer for the purpose. Having worked as a telegraph girl, Dora takes an interest in the proceedings, noting that the engineer ‘instead of poles, used a thin isolated “cable,” running in a shallow trench underground’ (89). Dora solves the mystery by her knowledge of the workings of both telegraphy and electricity, being able to spot that the criminal in a previous race had given an electric shock to the leading horse which slowed it down, causing his

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own to take the lead. Having figured this out, Dora makes sure that it is Sir Warner’s horse that receives the shock, and thus loses the race. Dora confronts Sir Warner with his foul play, explaining to him ‘“precisely how the thing was done”’: ‘The electric generator was worked at your shooting lodge by your good friend Mr. Shore [the electrical engineer], who hitched it on to the telegraph wire. A tubing of gutta-­percha tissue, with copper buckshot inside of it, was run through the thick branches of the blackthorn, and isolated in the bottle at the far end. The first horse through the fence broke the tubing, scattered the buckshot, made the connection, and I don’t know how many volts of electricity through his body. It was a neat trap, Sir Warner, but it caught the wrong bird this time.’ (99)

In this crime by electricity and magnetism, embodied in the electric generator, Dora proves that Sir Warner had an electric current jolt the lead horse in the race. By recognising that the engineer had created his own electric cable out of copper and gutta-­percha – the gutta-­percha tissue used as an insulator to cover the make-­do wire of copper buckshot – she also proves her up-­to-­date knowledge of modern electrical engineering. Like Dr Phillimore in ‘The Palmist’, the villain of ‘The Last Shall Be the First’ had earlier made light of Dora’s profession, regarding her ‘pretensions as a detective . . . with good-­humoured amusement’ (88). However, once beaten, Sir Warner for the first time ‘recognised the kind of woman he had to deal with, and guessed, too, by whom he had been checkmated’ (99). Afraid of a scandal, Sir Warner admits defeat and pays the money he has lost in the most recent race. While the railway – unlike electricity – by 1900 could no longer be considered a novelty for British readers, it remained an emblem of nineteenth-­century modernity (Carter 2001). We find another of the ‘railway offences’ mentioned by Lombroso in the story ‘A Railway Race’. Suspecting an impending crime, Dora disguises herself as a District Company telegram messenger boy in order to follow the villain of the story, who is jealous of his friend Tom Mordor’s marriage. Dora sees the villain and an infamous dynamiter ‘desperado’ planning something using a large ‘outline map and a Bradshaw railway guide’ (134), and from this she deduces that he plans to have his friend killed in relation to a railway journey. Through deciphering a telegram, she learns the location and time of the planned attempt not just on Tom’s life, but on the lives of every passenger on the same train. Dora convinces the superintendent at the London South-­Eastern line to send out another train – ‘“the fastest engine on the line”’ (140) – to warn the passengers in danger. The following pages of the story consist of a fast-­paced railway chase, with Dora, the station superintendent and

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railway workers working against the clock to catch up with the other train: Through the long suburbs they fled, with rows of houses with lights in the windows racing and twisting on either side. They broke abruptly from the city out into the open country. The red light showed far ahead in waves and flashed, and the angry wind whistled and howled as they tore through a hurricane. . . . The steam puffed through the funnel and hissed through the safety valves, and still the engine flew. Wheels, and cranks, and pistons made clanging rhythm through the silent night. . . . Down long grades they rushed without a touch of the brake, and round clean curves, whirling, as it were, on the outer edge, with the further wheels clean lifted from the rails. . . . So the miles of rails slid backwards under those flying wheels, and the fatal terminus came on. (144–5)

If, as Paul Virilio (1986) suggests, modernity is characterised as a culture of speed, the fast-­ paced and extended railway race emphasises that while railways may not be new at the end of the century, they are still modern. Indeed, a similar railway crime involving dynamite appears just a few years later in the 1903 US film The Great Train Robbery, which brings together the modernity of the railway with then new cinematic techniques. The fast-­paced pursuit in Dora Myrl in a way seems to premeditate the fascination with technology and speed of such early cinema and later modernist movements. Luckily Dora’s crew reaches the other train in time, saving its passengers. Photography was another early nineteenth-­ century invention that kept updating its modern character at the end of the century. Since the 1880s, which paired the introduction of dry-­plate and celluloid film with mass production of portable, affordable and easy-­to-­use cameras, photography had become available not only to professional photographers but also to individuals (Thomas 1999: 129). As noted earlier, photography proved the most valuable technology of all in nineteenth-­ century detection, and photographic technology evolved alongside detective work, towards the end of the century introducing the small and easily hidden ‘detective camera’ (Thomas 1999: 169). In an article entitled ‘Detection of Crime by Photography’, in Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts in 1892, T. C. Hepworth asserts that in ‘the detection of criminals the Photographic Camera has lately performed such novel feats, that quite a fresh set of ideas is placed at the disposal of fiction-­mongers’ (1892: 326). Referring to the work of a German chemist specialising in ‘the detection of crime by scientific means’, Hepworth lists a number of cases which have been solved by the use of photography. In addition to the photographing of criminals for identification, this system may be extended to photographing the scene

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of the crime, ‘for the camera will faithfully record little details, at the time considered unimportant, but which may supply a valuable link in the chain of evidence later on’ (327). This latter use becomes central to the production of judicial evidence and the solution to the case in ‘Was It a Forgery?’, in which Dora uses a photograph to question the forgery of a will. After the death of the great book collector Sir Randal Lovel, Dora in ‘Was It a Forgery?’ is sent to the Lovel household to ensure the safety of his will. No one has seen the late Sir Lovel’s new will, in which he supposedly disinherits his villainous nephew Albert in favour of his niece Annie. Since someone has already attempted a burglary of the strong safe in which the will is kept, Dora takes every precaution against further attempts. Having brought with her ‘an ingenious little toy of her own contriving from London; an electric battery and bell and coil of isolated wire’, she arranges this homemade alarm so that ‘a touch at the door or the window of the study would set the bell ringing’ (177). While no alarm sounds, the key to the safe is somehow stolen. When the time comes to read the will, Annie is named as the sole inheritor. However, having observed the suspicious activities around the household, Dora takes precautions in case Albert should try to destroy this will in order to contest it. In ‘Detection of Crime by Photography’, Hepworth notes the detection of ‘falsification of handwriting and figures by means of photography’ as a crucial component of scientific detection. An examination with a microscope will show ‘places in paper where erasures have been made’ or ascertain ‘whether an alteration has been made in a word before the ink first applied has become dry, or whether the amendment has been an afterthought’, or if different sorts of ink have been used (1892: 327). Dora similarly uses photography to safeguard a copy of the original will, in case it should be lost or altered. Advised that a copy of the will can be proved even if destroyed, Dora takes a photograph of the document, using her own camera. A few weeks later the will’s authenticity is questioned, as it seems altered to favour Annie instead of Albert. As is discovered later, Albert himself has altered the will, since in case of forgery the inheritance goes to him as the closest male relative. A news report states: ‘At the words “niece Annie” there had been plainly a most skilful erasure and rewriting. The letters “iece” in “niece” and the letters “nnie” in “Annie” had plainly been most cleverly forged in the handwriting of the testator. The suggestion was that the word had originally stood “nephew Albert,” . . . All in court were astounded at the discovery, and all sorts of rumours were rife as to the identity of the forger.’ (190–1)

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Also in cases of forgery, as the 1880 article ‘Science and Crime’ states, science is at the heart of nineteenth-­century detection of crime: ‘Not a case of forgery is tried but the expert in caligraphy [sic] and engraving is appealed to in order to aid the cause of justice, by the detection, through scientific means, of likenesses or differences in hand-­ writing, or of alterations and erasures in disputed deeds or manuscripts’ (1880: 348). In Dora Myrl, an expert is called in to examine the supposedly forged will. However, when Dora presents her photograph of the original will to examine alongside the supposedly forged one, the expert can find no trace of erasure and rewriting in the legatee’s name in the photograph. Hepworth in ‘Detection of Crime by Photography’ notes the specific usefulness of photographing a crime scene or an object so it can be used ‘in microscopical examination, and in the subsequent photographing of the object examined in much magnified form . . . [s]uch a photograph will often afford evidence of the most positive kind, which can be readily comprehended and duly appraised by judge and jury alike’ (1892: 327). Dora presents such a magnified form of the photograph to the expert, who examines the will through his pocket microscope: ‘Will you kindly look at this enlarged photograph of the will through the microscope? The words “niece Annie” if you please. Do you find any trace here of erasure or re-­writing?’   ‘None whatever.’   ‘If they had been there when the photograph was taken the camera would have found and shown them, I presume?’   ‘Certainly.’ (195)

Having suspected that Albert would attempt to change the will, Dora had as a precaution secretly ‘poured ground glass into the ink-­bottle which she thought it likely he would use’ (196), which becomes visible in the words written into the will when it is once again examined in court. Locating in Albert’s bag the same glass granules in his ink-­bottle, and a mould of the key to the safe, Dora proves to the leading counsel that it is Albert himself who has altered the document. While the ‘eminent expert’ and the court had initially declared the will a forgery and thus invalid, Dora corrects them in their surmises by her own observations, deductions and technical skills. In this story, as in Conan Doyle’s ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, photography becomes the final evidence which cannot be altered: the jury finds in favour of the will, leaving Annie her uncle’s inheritance. One of the first things we learn about Dora is that she is a Cambridge Mathematics graduate. As Mathematics was ‘the stock subject’ for New Woman university scholars of popular fiction (Willis 1999: 59),

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the final tale in Dora Myrl sees the New Woman detective make use of her studies when helping a former university colleague who is now a leading aviation pioneer. In this story called ‘The Wings of a Bird’, McDonnell Bodkin engages with late nineteenth-­century theories and inventions of human flight, and has his female detective safeguarding new aviation technology from maleficent use. The colleague in question is the celebrated inventor Ernest Fairleigh, who had been the Senior Wrangler in Cambridge the year Dora took her degree, making him ‘the chief boast of the university at the time’ (236). As Kestner points out, the Cambridge friendship between the inventor/scientist Fairleigh and the New Woman detective Dora is important both as it demonstrates ‘that men and women are equal in their knowledge and ability’ and as it affirms ‘that detection is a form of science’ (2003: 179). Fairleigh specialises in Applied Mathematics, a subject in which ‘his supremacy was universally confessed’, and when Dora encounters him there are strange stories buzzing about London regarding ‘the inventions he made or was about to make’ (236). These inventions relate to Fairleigh’s life-­long dream of inventing modes of human flight. While it may have seemed at the end of the nineteenth century that all possible modes of transport had been invented – the railway, the bicycle, and the motor car the latest addition – the possibility of human flight still fascinated inventors as well as the public. In an 1893 article entitled ‘The Advent of the Flying Man’ in the Pall Mall Gazette, H. G. Wells gives voice to the fin de siècle interest in human flight, imagining the possibilities that such a new feat of engineering might bring: ‘One might fancy him at last – his initial difficulties conquered – flapping serenely through the nether air, all the streets agape, as he pursues his way. And the pleasure of such travelling! Locomotion free from friction; the earth spread out below one, and the sweet air rushing by!’ (1893: 1). Wells remarks specifically on the high speed which flying might make possible, noting that ‘the swiftest cycling is mere snail’s crawling’ to the possibilities of speed in flight, by which humans might be able to outrun an express train (2). W. E. Garett Fisher in ‘The Art of Flying’ (Fortnightly Review 1899) agrees that one-­person flying machines ‘ought not to be much more costly nor much more difficult to learn, for young and athletic men, than a bicycle’ (1899: 758). Continuing the bicycle comparison, Wells suggest that the story of human flight ‘will be the story of cycling over again’: ‘The pioneer lady will distinguish herself, and all the Ladies’ papers will cry out at her, as they cried out when she first smoked cigarettes, and when she first rode a bicycle’ (1893: 2). While a sketch of future Londoners flying to work may seem fantastic, Wells admits, it is perhaps ‘not more so than a description of a cycling tour or

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an account of a modern railway could have done a hundred years ago’ (1893: 2). Human flight seems to be the last remaining frontier with regards to transport. No wonder, then, that the modern Dora is enthralled to hear about her old school friend’s progress in aviation. On Dora’s request, Fairleigh tells her about the hints he has taken from previous inventors, such as ‘“[t]he balloonist, the wingist, and the aeroplanist – if I may coin two awkward words”’ (239). The ‘wingist’ referred to by Fairleigh is likely the German inventor Otto Lilienthal, known as ‘the Father of Flight’ and often cited as the chief aviation pioneer before he died in a flying attempt in 1896.3 While the 1890s saw a variety of innovations in aviation, Garrett Fisher in ‘The Art of Flying’ and Octave Chanute, the latter himself an aviation pioneer, in ‘Experiments in Flying’ (The Ludgate 1900) both highlight the work of Lilienthal when describing the milestones of aviation history. Distinct from other aviation pioneers, Lilienthal became famous for his studies of bird flight, especially that of storks, by describing the aerodynamics of their wings. His theories were popularised through the publication of Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst in 1889, or as published in translation Birdflight as the Basis for Aviation in 1893. Fairleigh in Dora Myrl similarly studies human anatomy in comparison with that of the bird, coupled with knowledge of mathematics and physics such as gravity: ‘“So I set myself to consider the comparative strength of the man’s muscles and the bird’s, and I made this interesting discovery. . . . In proportion to their respective weight the bird’s muscles are stronger than the man’s”’ (240). As Wells notes in his article on human flight, there lies a real challenge in that ‘the flying-­machine must be a thing heavier than air’ – it will have to keep itself up ‘by exposing a considerable surface of wing to the wind, and by a proper exercise of force upon the atmosphere’, rather than through its bulk, as the balloon (1893: 1). This is a challenge faced by Fairleigh, who details his experiments in engineering over several pages of the book. Dora listens intently to Fairleigh’s efforts to manipulate weight and mass and in this way also ‘specific gravity’, that is, the specific density of a substance (in this case the human body) in relation to a reference substance (in this case the surrounding air), only interrupting now and then to ask questions: ‘It was no hard task to make a framework, light and strong, covered with oil silk and filled with hydrogen, which fitted to man like a great padded overcoat, increased his bulk at the same time. . . . My framework was curved at the back but flat in the front, and designed so as to rise against the wind and support itself steadily in the mid-­air.’   ‘But the motive power was still needed?’ Dora interposed.

192    Gender, Technology and the New Woman   ‘Quite right, Miss Myrl,’ he said, delighted at her eager appreciation, ‘and that was the hardest nut of all to crack. You see it was not a machine I wanted to make fly, but a man. . . . My notion was to make him his own flying machine and his own muscles the sole motive power of his flight.’   ‘Are his muscles strong enough?’   ‘Well objected, Miss Myrl, my story provokes the question. . . . My combination man-­bird can, I believe, fly with the wind or against it – against for a preference, if it is not too strong – at the rate of sixty miles an hour.’ (241–3)

While taking inspiration from the ‘wingist’ in his study of bird flight, Fairleigh uses the balloonist’s method in creating a hydrogen-­filled silk framework fitting a man ‘like a great padded overcoat’, and the aeroplanist’s study of aerodynamics to make the framework ‘curved at the back but flat in the front’ so as to rise against the wind. Hot-­air balloons only lift off vertically, and have no own ‘motive power’ (the agent used to impart motion to the flying machinery) but are only carried by the wind and cannot be steered properly, so to steer and have horizontal movement, indeed ‘“the motive power was still needed”’, as Dora remarks. As in birds’ flight, Fairleigh locates the muscles as the sole motive power, allowing his ‘man-bird­’ to use both hands and feet in order to impart strength. Wells concludes his article on human flight by stating that the flying man is so close that ‘even now the imaginative person may hear the beating of his wings’ (1893: 2). And indeed, at the end of Dora’s long conversation with Fairleigh, her friend discloses that his invention ‘“is no longer theory with me”’ but that he himself a few nights ago ‘“flew five miles without fatigue or difficulty; time, a little over a quarter of an hour”’ (244). Despite the importance of the invention, Fairleigh has not yet patented his plans, as he wants them finalised before sending them to the Patent Office. Despite Dora’s suggested precautions to take so as to safeguard the plans, two days later they are stolen from his office. Dora quickly solves the case – thus outdoing both the Scotland Yard inspector called to the scene, and her great inventor friend, who are both looking ‘equally disconcerted and bewildered’ (249) when she arrives – by exposing Fairleigh’s clerk, who has used a carrier pigeon to smuggle out the plans. Despite Lombroso’s assertion in his 1900 article that as criminals ‘enter into new instruments they develop fresh forms of crime’ (1900: 310), here it is the simple non-­mechanical bird – the inspiration of the ‘wingist’ of the time – that provides the means of carrying out the crime. Dora outsmarts the criminal and thus secures the future of Fairleigh’s new science of flying. Slung suggests that early women detectives tended to deal with ‘crimes of a straight-­forward nature – cases of murder or theft which they solve

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without the pyrotechnics of their more famous male counterparts’ (1976: xxi), while Stephen Knight similarly reads the Dora Myrl stories as ‘turn[ing] on simple tricks . . . combin[ing] the promise of intellectualism with the actuality of rather mechanical, trick-­based detection’ (2004: 79). However, while this may be true for cases such as ‘The Hidden Violin’, in which Dora locates a stolen violin on the thief’s back, or ‘Weighed and Found Wanting’, in which she proves a jewel dealer’s dishonest use of magnets, the majority of the stories revolve around modern technologies and questions of forensic knowledge production. Even in less ingenious cases, the fact remains that Dora, a female detective, in many cases proves her detection skills to be equal or even superior to those of the official male law enforcement, thus undermining the established gender order. In the story ‘Hide and Seek’, for instance, Dora solves the theft of a valuable painting by quickly locating both the painting and the criminal, in the process outsmarting a Scotland Yard inspector who is about to arrest the wrong man. Perhaps surprisingly, a marriage plot is left out of this series of narratives about Dora, unlike many contemporary New Woman fictions. When her old Cambridge friend Fairleigh tries to flirt with her, Dora insists on hearing about his scientific explorations: ‘“Bar lovemaking, please, at least for the present, and talk shop!”’ (237). However, in the novel The Capture of Paul Beck (1909) McDonnell Bodkin pairs Dora with his famous character Paul Beck, the two detectives working as rivals on the same case. Later Dora and Paul appear in a parental role in Young Beck: A Chip of the Old Block (1911), a collection of short stories featuring their son. Craig and Cadogan read this insertion of a marriage plot in the later novel as an adjustment to late Victorian gender conformity and to the demands of the literary marketplace. Despite the character’s initial promise, they argue, Dora was ‘doomed to extinction as a detective when marriage and motherhood caught up with her’: ‘She had to “get her man” in the marital sense, not only to fit in with reader’s notions of where a woman’s permanent place should be, but perhaps to avoid a clash in popularity and sales markets’ (1981: 33). Klein similarly argues that McDonnell Bodkin centres Dora Myrl’s narrative around the marriage plot, in this way ‘[r]ejecting the implications of the so-­called new woman and her role’ (1995: 58). However, in addition to the overt exclusion of a romance plot in Dora Myrl, even though Dora does marry the famous male detective at the end of The Capture of Paul Beck, she still proves more than equal to him. While Craig and Cadogan argue that Dora ‘slips quickly enough into the role of subservient female’ (1981: 33) when encountering Paul Beck, Dora in fact throughout the novel outwits her male counterpart, repeatedly thwarting his plans and

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in one instance removing a clue right in front of his eyes. Having witnessed Dora repeatedly defeat her male rival, a friend assures Dora that Paul Beck is not the ablest detective in London, as is generally thought, but only the ‘“ablest male detective”’ (McDonnell Bodkin 1909: 133). Dora is outsmarted by Paul only once, after which he joins her side, and it is Dora who finally captures the criminal while also saving Paul’s life. In The Capture of Paul Beck, Dora is still ‘the famous lady detective, whose subtle wit had foiled the most cunning criminals, whose cool courage had faced the most appalling dangers . . . the tracker of criminals, the unraveller of mysteries’ (75, 115–16). She is also still described as the typical athletic New Woman, having the ‘slim, agile figure of an athletic out-­of-­doors girl’ (74–5), and just like in Dora Myrl, she is an excellent bicyclist. Indeed, she repeats the bicycle chase of ‘How He Cut His Stick’ in the 1909 novel as she speeds through London after a hansom cab to thwart one of Paul Beck’s plans: In the street she clicked the high speed gear to her bicycle and was off . . . Bending a little over the handle bars she made the bicycle fly. . . . She found herself in a rushing stream of vehicles and went through it zig-­zag, like a darting trout in a stream, finding an opening to the right or left, and shooting through before it closed again. It was perilous work for eyes less quick or nerves less steady than Dora’s. . . . There was not a cab horse in London that could keep his distance from Dora on her bicycle. (147–9)

The moment in which Dora catches up with the hansom cab, its occupant seeing her ‘gliding with perfect ease by the side of the rushing, rocking hansom’ (150), is depicted in the frontispiece of the 1911 US edition of the novel. Dora and her bicycle – that New Woman technology and emblem above all others – thus not only make the cover of Dora Myrl but are at the centre of the only illustration accompanying this edition of The Capture of Paul Beck. As was the case with other commercial New Woman fiction, the New Woman detective genre was to an extent created to satisfy ‘popular demand and mass imagination’ (Klein 1995: 72). Following from this, the female detective narrative could be considered as ‘reinforcing a conservative ideology’ both by the supposed incompatibility in many stories of the heroine’s profession and love life, and by the insistence on the characters’ ‘ladylike behaviour and appearance’ (Klein 1995: 72); Slung notes that many female detectives were ‘overendowed with feminine charms to compensate for their mannish profession’ (1976: xix). However, this insistence on ‘ladylike’ behaviour as a function of New Woman detective fiction does not necessarily negate the cultural work done by such narratives in normalising women’s place in law enforce-

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ment and in the production of scientific knowledge. The emphasis on the ‘ladylike’ behaviour or ‘womanly’ character of these early female detectives does not have to undercut the importance of portraying women as rational creatures on the same level as, or even surpassing, their male counterparts within the police force, decades before women of flesh and blood would enter that field. While the genre often contains references to the heroines’ ‘womanly’ character or their external appearance, these female sleuths perhaps had to appear ‘womanly’ in order to survive on the literary market, to carry out the cultural work of challenging the male gendering of the spheres of science and law enforcement.

Notes 1. As Michele Slung notes, ‘there were no women actually attached to the Metropolitan Police in London until 1883, when two women were appointed to oversee female prisoners’ (1976: xviii). The uniformed Women’s Police Service was founded in 1914, and Metropolitan Women Police Patrols were approved in 1918 (Kestner 2003: 5). As early as 1905, Eilidh MacDougall worked for the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) to take statements involving sex cases, but she was not a police officer, and while the uniformed sergeant Lilian Wyles was transferred to CID in December 1922 and became the first detective sergeant, she did not do actual detective work – rather, the first woman detective was the police constable Louisa Pelling, who was appointed to Special Branch around that time (Kestner 2003: 5). 2. As Thomas notes, such ‘truths’ were always embedded in larger political structures and narratives: constructions of the criminal body ‘around a “science” of racial typing’, for instance, could appear alongside ‘political explanations of brutal imperial policies’ in order to ‘confirm and justify one another’ (1999: 5). Late nineteenth-­century British detective fiction in these instances partakes in the cultural work of defending white supremacist racial theories and the British imperial project. 3. Many thanks to Nina Engelhardt for highlighting this connection.

Conclusion

This book has highlighted the essential link between gender and modern technologies as crucial not only to New Woman writing but to early or first-­wave British feminism. Locating the New Woman in connection to technologies of the time provides an understanding of how certain technologies come to work as ‘freedom machines’, as visual emblems signifying female emancipation. Throughout the book, the fundamental conflict between technological determinism and feminist criticism has been stressed: the ‘modern’ aspects of late nineteenth-­century technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle and medical technologies entail the ways in which they are taken up as symbols of emancipation and ‘newness’ in literary works, as well as in the medical and periodical press. In addition to analysing specific late nineteenth-­century technologies, this book has drawn attention to the technology of language itself: the ways in which literary texts work as social and cultural agents. Material objects and institutional technologies, and technologies of self-­ formation, come together in these fictions through yet another technology; that of the text itself. In this way, New Woman writing that engages with technology partakes in and shapes late nineteenth-­century debates regarding both social and literary issues. As shown, the entanglement of changing gender relations and modern technologies was a crucial component of British first-­wave feminism. However, the technologies used by these late nineteenth-­century feminists are present still today: we exist in the aftermath of that ‘founding age of technological media’ described by Kittler (1999: xl). Readers of this book most likely use twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century variations of late nineteenth-­century technologies every day: listening to recorded music on a device stemming from the phonograph, or the radio whose wireless function came about in the late nineteenth century, looking at moving images originally made possible through the cinema and its precursors (such as the zoetrope) and writing on laptops or desktop

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computers which serve as an extension of the typewriter. Perhaps the reader accesses this very book not in physical form but on a laptop or similar device with its QWERTYUIOP keyboard stemming from early typewriter design, maybe while listening to recorded music or other sounds. If late nineteenth-­century technological modernity enabled the fabrication of the New Woman, what do current technologies make possible for twenty-­first-­century feminists and in other struggles for social justice? While late nineteenth-­century technological modernity shaped the figuration of New Womanhood through opening up territories previously defined as male (such as the modern office, the outdoors or the hospital) and providing space for new formulations of subjectivity, gender and technology remain interlinked in struggles for equality also in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. This might be through technofeminist reimaginings of gender configurations via the figure of the cyborg, through online campaigns calling for better gender representation in politics, or through using smartphones and other digital technologies to build collectives of feminist storytelling to share experiences of everyday sexism or street harassment. As in the late nineteenth century, technologies are still volatile, bearing different potential outcomes. While bicycling New Women were scorned and called ‘unwomanly’ for their use of the new technology, and typewriters in their opening up of the gendering of the office sphere also exposed female typists to sexual objectification, technology is used today to trace and abuse outspoken feminists, for example via social media. Reading both late nineteenth-­century and twentieth-­to twenty-­first-­ century technologies through feminist theories of technology, we see that technologies in themselves have no power to change social structures, but this depends on how they are employed. Technologies such as the typewriter or the bicycle were and are not in themselves inherently progressive, but their emancipatory potential lies in how they come to be used and constructed in literature and culture. A tool can be used in a variety of ways, technology bearing both revolutionary and conservative potential: although invented for a specific purpose, technologies might have a different impact depending on how they are taken up in society. While social media can be used to share pictures of one’s lunch, or to harass campaigners for social justice, it can also be used to build feminist movements, work for an end to racial injustice and police brutality, or even to start revolutions.

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Index

agency, 27–32, 41–2 Allen, Grant authorship, 46–7, 55, 79 ‘dual consciousness’ of characters, 55, 96–7, 127 and female detective, 116 and H. G. Wells, 79 and the Woman Question, 46–7 writing as Olive Pratt Rayner, 47–9 Hilda Wade, 7, 10, 115–30 Miss Cayley’s Adventures, 7, 55, 116 Rosalba: The Story of Her Development, 47, 78 The Type-Writer Girl, 46–57, 77, 92 The Woman Who Did, 46–7, 61n Anthony, Susan B., 64

as main emblem of the New Woman, 62–4, 75, 178–9, 194 medical opinion of, 70–1, 95 racing, 92–6 Rover safety design, 62–3 as symbol of female emancipation, 63–4, 73–4, 75 as technology of democratisation, 63, 78, 80–9 as unsexing, 66–71, 84, 85, 91 bicycle craze of the 1890s, 62, 65–6, 80–1, 99n Boer War, 7, 128 British Medical Journal, 69, 70–1, 72, 106–7, 136–7, 140 British South Africa Company, 126, 127

Baillie Reynolds, Mrs, Phoebe in Fetters, 37 Baker, Elizabeth, 61n Barr, Robert, ‘The Typewriter Girl’, 37 Barrie, J. M., The Twelve-Pound Look, 38 Benjamin, Walter, 166 Bertillon, Alphonse, 173, 175 Besant, Walter, 107 bicycle, 62–100 in advertising, 90–3 and class, 78, 80–9 and crime, 179–81 cycling clubs, 65, 99n cycling guidebooks, 65, 68–9, 71, 72 cycling journals, 65–6 in early film, 99n in fiction, 74–99, 126–7, 178–9 graceful riding of, 84, 92, 94–7 invention and development, 62–3, 100n

Caird, Mona, 46, 155 Carpenter, Edward, 69 Cather, Willa, ‘Tommy, the Unsentimental’, 75 Chopin, Kate ‘Charlie’, 75 ‘The Unexpected’, 75 Clarion Cycling Club, 99n clinic, birth of, 108–11 Collins, Wilkie, ‘Fie! Fie! the Fair Physician’, 142 commercial fiction see popular fiction composite photography, 174 Conan Doyle, Arthur completing Hilda Wade, 115 on medical modernity, 132 Sherlock Holmes’s use of scientific method, 120–1, 175–6 ‘The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist’, 76–7 ‘A Case of Identity’, 37, 173

214    Gender, Technology and the New Woman Conan Doyle, Arthur (cont.) ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’, 157–62 The Hound of Baskervilles, 175 ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, 166, 176–7 The Sign of Four, 121, 175 A Study in Scarlet, 120–1, 175 ‘The Voice of Science’, 10 cycling see bicycle Cycling: An Illustrated Weekly, 62, 65 Darwin, Charles, 133–4 degeneration, 147–8 detective, female, history of, 166, 195n detective fiction, 164–72, 175–95 conservatism of genre, 170–1, 194–5 and disguise, 166–8 female detective fiction, 164–71, 177–95 history of genre, 165–6 link to New Woman, 164–71; see also McDonnell Bodkin, Mathias: Dora Myrl and technology see forensic science and technology use of scientific method, 120–1, 169 diagnosis, 110–11, 118 discourse, 17–20, 22, 41 dissection, 136–7 doctor, female see female doctor doctor–nurse relationship, 106–7, 109–10, 114–15, 117, 129–30; see also hospital hierarchies Dowie, Ménie Muriel, Love and his Mask, 37 dress reform see rational dress dynamite, 179, 186 Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, 138, 151 Edinburgh Seven, 134–5, 138, 139–40, 157; see also Reade, Charles Egerton, George, 33n nursing training, 131n ‘Her Share’, 75 ‘The Spell of the White Elf’, 33n electricity, 179, 184–6 eugenics, 70, 79, 147–9 Felski, Rita, 4, 13, 19, 20, 73, 79 female doctor, 132–63 career incompatible with marriage, 141, 144–5, 155–7, 162 debate, 134–8 in fiction, 139–63, 178–9

harassment, of, 138 opposition to, 135–8 support for, 137 training as threatening feminine delicacy, 136–7, 145–7, 149, 153–4 training at University of Edinburgh, 134–5, 138, 140; see also Edinburgh Seven training at University of London, 137, 138 as unsexed, 133, 141, 143, 145–51, 152–3, 159, 161–2 as womanly, 142–3, 150, 155 feminine intuition see gendering of knowledge fin de siècle, 2, 12–13 literary marketplace, 3, 13, 19, 33n, 89–91, 99, 193 and modernity, 13 origin of term, 32–3n fingerprinting, 173 forensic science and technology, 171–7 Foucault, Michel and agency, 31 and the body, 31, 54 ‘death of man’, 25 definition of technology, 29–32, 41–2 and discourse, 18–19, 22, 41 and feminism, 31 and forensic science, 172 and power, 29–31, 109, 125 and production of knowledge, 109, 110 and technologies of self-formation, 30, 109 Gallon, Tom authorship, 57 The Girl Behind the Keys, 57–60 Garrett Anderson, Elizabeth, 134, 140, 156–7 gender and agency, 27–9 definition, 26 and power, 26 and space, 4, 40 and technology, 25, 26–32 gender-technology relationship, 2, 28–9 gendering of knowledge, 111, 117–21, 170 Girton Girl, 2, 15, 67, 91, 178–9, 189–90

Index    215 Gissing, George ‘A Daughter of the Lodge’, 78 The Odd Women, 9–10, 38–9, 45 Grand, Sarah and the bicycle, 5, 67 naming of New Woman, 2, 14 Gray, Maxwell (Mary Gleed Tuttiett), Sweethearts and Friends, 144 Gregg, Hilda, 139 Peace with Honour, 144–5, 149 Grub Street writer, 6, 13, 33n Grundy, Sydney, The New Woman, 16 gynocriticism, 17–19, 33n, 48 critique of, 18–20, 32 Hardy, Thomas, A Laodicean, 8–9 Harkness, Margaret, A City Girl, 112–13 Heidegger, Martin, 29, 52–3 Henley, William Ernest, In Hospital, 102–3 Hepworth Dixon, Ella on the bicycle, 64 The Story of a Modern Woman, 9, 61n, 112–14 higher education, women’s entry into, 132, 133–8 hospital hierarchical structure see hospital hierarchies history and development of, 108; see also clinic, birth of as institutional technology, 108–11 nursing move into, 103–4 and production of knowledge, 109–11, 117–21 hospital hierarchies, 106–7, 109–11, 114–15, 119, 123, 125, 136 human flight, 190–2 Hume, Fergus, Hagar of the PawnShop, 168–9 Ibsen, Henrik, 14, 22 imperialism, 6–7, 125–9, 144–5 imperialist feminism, 7, 125–9 ‘Iota’ (Kathleen Mannington Caffyn), nursing training, 131n islamophobia, 7 James, Henry, In the Cage, 9 Jex-Blake, Sophia, 134–5, 138, 139, 140, 142, 150, 151, 154; see also Edinburgh Seven

Kenealy, Arabella on the bicycle, 70 Dr Janet of Harley Street, 147–51, 154, 156 ‘The Talent of Motherhood’, 70 ‘Woman as an Athlete’, 70 Kennard, Mary E., The Golf Lunatic and His Cycling Wife, 77–8 Keynote series, 46 Kittler, Friedrich, 25, 41–2, 50–1, 52–4 Lady Cyclists’ Association, 65, 68 The Lancet, 69, 104, 135 Ledger, Sally, 6, 16, 21 Levy, Amy, The Romance of a Shop, 9, 61n Lilienthal, Otto, 191 literary marketplace, 3, 13, 19, 33n, 89–91, 99 literature cultural work of, 3, 74, 88; see also Tompkins, Jane as technology, 3, 32 Lombroso, Cesare, 173, 179 London Phonographer, 36–7, 44–5, 51 London School of Medicine for Women, 70, 138, 152 Lynn Linton, Mrs, 86 McDonnell Bodkin, Mathias authorship, 178 The Capture of Paul Beck, 193–4 Dora Myrl, 164–5, 177–94 marriage debate, 10, 22, 46 marriage plot, 141–5, 155–7, 170–1, 193 Marryat, Florence, An Angel of Pity, 112, 114–15 Massey, Doreen, 4 Matabele Rebellion, 127–8 Maudsley, Henry, 134 Meade, L. T. The Medicine Lady, 142–3 Stories from a Diary of a Doctor, 112 Meade, L. T., and Robert Eustace, Detections of Miss Cusack, 170 medical authority, 157–62 medical gaze, 110–11, 118, 120–1 medical modernity, 101, 108–11, 132, 159–60 diagnostic tools, 108–11, 160 see also clinic, birth of; hospital: as institutional technology

216    Gender, Technology and the New Woman Meynell, Alice, ‘A Woman in Grey’, 76–7 microscope, 174, 183, 188–9 midwifery, as alternative to doctoring, 135–6 modernity, 13, 25 definition, 25 and gender, 25 medical see medical modernity technological see technological modernity Morgan-Dockrell, Mrs, 1–2, 14, 21 Mrs Grundy, 22 Naden, Constance, ‘The Lady Doctor’, 132–3, 142, 147 Ndebele people see Matabele Rebellion New Style nurse, 101–7, 111 New Woman and the bicycle, 62–99, 126–7, 178–9, 194 and class, 5, 11n, 78, 80–9 and commercialism, 89–99, 166, 193–5 and consumer capitalism, 19–20 and the crisis in gender, 16, 66 debate, 13, 14, 15–16, 19, 20 definition, 15–17 doctor, 139–63; see also female doctor entry into male sphere, 4, 39–40 as focal figure, 2, 14, 16 and imperialism, 7, 125–9, 144–5 in a material context, 21, 23–4 naming of, 14–15, 38 as new gender / sexual type, 16, 38–9, 43 as novelty, 13–14, 20 nurse see nurse: New Woman and physical exercise see physical exercise for women as precursor to suffrage movement, 4–5 scholarship, 17–18, 21–2, 33n as semi-fictional, 21–3, 73, 89–90 as textual construct, 15 as typist, 36–9 as unsexed, 4, 39–40, 66–71, 84–5, 91, 133, 145 Nightingale, Florence, 101, 103–4, 105, 108, 111, 113, 130–1n, 135 Nordau, Max, 12, 148 nurse, 101–30 in fiction, 111–15

New Style, 101–7, 111, 112, 121–2 New Woman, 115–16; see also nurse: New Style Old Style, 102–3, 112, 131n registration of, 104, 106–7 relationship with doctor see doctor– nurse relationship as tool, 121–5 use of bicycle, 131n nursing, 101–30 as alternative to doctoring, 135–7 debate, 106–7 exhibitions, 104 as a feminine occupation, 103–4, 112–15, 117, 119, 122, 135–7 handbooks, 105, 122 importance of observation, 110–11, 116 and modern technology, 102–6 move into hospital, 103–4 schools, 104, 131n transformation of, 102–6, 130–1n Nursing Record, 105, 131n office entry of female workers, 35–7, 39 modernisation of, 35 omnibus, 9–10 Orczy, Baroness, Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, 170 Orientalism, 7, 52; see also imperialism Ormiston Chant, Mrs, 70 Ouida, 14–15 Pechey, Edith, 138; see also Edinburgh Seven phonograph, 10 photography, 9–10, 129, 173, 187–9 physical exercise for women, 66–71, 91, 133–4, 145, 148–9 linked to rational dress, 71–4 Pirkis, Charlotte Louisa, Experiences of Loveday Brooke, 167–8 popular fiction, 6, 19–20, 75, 166, 193–5; see also Grub Street writer power and the body, 31, 54 as mobile relations, 29–31, 109, 125 and technology, 29–31 professionalism, 136; see also medical authority pseudoscience, 6, 133–4, 183–4 Punch, or the London Charivari, 15, 22–3, 66, 71, 85, 142, 146

Index    217 ‘Donna Quixote’, 22–3, 88 ‘Sexomania’, 66–7, 85, 91, 145 railway, 8–9, 180–1, 186–7 rational dress, 22–3, 54, 62–4, 65, 66, 71–4, 80, 82–5, 93, 100n linked to physical exercise, 71–4 Rational Dress Association, 71, 72; see also Rational Dress Society Rational Dress Society, 71, 100n Reade, Charles, A Woman-Hater, 139–41, 146–7, 150, 156 Remington Company, 34, 61n Rhodes, Cecil, 126 Rhodesia, 125–8 Schreiner, Olive and the bicycle, 5, 10n, 67–8 and medical studies, 163n and the typewriter, 10n Story of an African Farm, 6, 14, 88, 139 ‘Three Dreams in a Desert’, 1–2, 5 Woman and Labour, 14 Science and Technology Studies, 26 scientific racism, 6–7, 127; see also imperialism Scott, Joan W., 18, 26 secretary, 56–7; see also typist semi-fictionality, 21–3, 73, 89–90 sensation fiction, 165 Shaw, George Bernard, Mrs Warren’s Profession, 75 Showalter, Elaine, 16 Sims, George R., Dorcas Dene, 168 southern Africa, 7, 125–9 space, gendering of, 4, 40 sports see physical exercise for women Stoker, Bram, Dracula, 10, 37 Stutfield, Hugh, 75 suffrage movement, 4–5, 141 Surgeons’ Hall, 138, 140 Swan, Annie S., Elizabeth Glen, M.B., 142, 143 Symonds, Emily Morse, A Writer of Books, 9, 76 technological determinism, 28–32, 42, 52–4, 60, 64; see also Heidegger, Martin technological modernity, 2, 23–5 in medicine see medical modernity technology and agency, 28–32, 41–2

definition, 26–7, 29–32 of detection see forensic science and technology of domination, 30; see also Foucault, Michel feminist theories of, 26–9, 31–2, 33n and gender, 25, 26–32 and imperialism, 6–7, 126–8, 144–5 and literature, 3, 24, 32 and modernity see technological modernity as part of power relations, 29–31, 41–2, 54; see also Foucault, Michel of self-formation, 30, 109; see also Foucault, Michel and society, mutual shaping of, 27–9 as visual emblem, 3, 5, 24, 62–4 and volition / potentiality, 27, 29–31 telegraph, 8–9, 180–1, 184–6 telephone, 9 Todd, Margaret authorship, 151 Mona Maclean, 151–7 Tompkins, Jane, 3 Trollope, Anthony, ‘The Telegraph Girl’, 8 typewriter, 34–60 invention and development, 34, 61n in offices, 34, 36–7; see also typist as operator and machine, 43–4 semantic ambiguity of term, 43–5, 49–50, 52 as visual emblem, 39 typewriting, nature of work, 44–5, 50–1, 55–6, 58–9 typewriting agency, 36, 38 typist, 34–60 ‘cultural fitting’ of, 53–4 as distinct from secretary, 56–7 in fiction, 37–9, 46–60 as machine, 42, 50–1, 56, 58–60; see also typewriting, nature of work as modern, 36–7 naming of, 43–5, 49–50 sexualisation of, 51–2 underground, 9–10 unsexing, 4, 39–40, 66–71, 84, 85, 91, 133, 141, 145–51 Vicinus, Martha, 4–5 vivisection, 114–15, 131n, 154

218    Gender, Technology and the New Woman Wells, H. G. authorship, 79 and the bicycle, 79–80, 100n feminist critique of, 79, 100n and Grant Allen, 79 ‘The Advent of the Flying Man’, 190–2

Ann Veronica, 80 The Wheels of Chance, 80–9, 99 West, Charles, 135–6, 148, 153 Willard, Frances, 64, 68, 71 Zimbabwe see Rhodesia